


Blue Moon

by untouchable



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s04e09 Something Blue, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Idiots in Love, Love Spell, Magical Bond, On the Run, Sexual Content, The Initiative, buffy just needs a nap honestly, season 4, spike needs a cigarette
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-05-12 17:17:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19233619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/untouchable/pseuds/untouchable
Summary: Things go a little differently during Something Blue. After sharing an intimate encounter with Spike during the Will Be Done spell, Buffy finds it difficult to get back to normal. And being kidnapped by the Initiative certainly doesn’t help.





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Updates posted first at Elysian Fields.

The microwave beeps and Buffy takes the blood-filled mug from within. It smells more than a little funky, pungent and metallic, but she can’t bring herself to mind. Not when she’s exiting Giles’ kitchen and Spike’s smiling at her like _that_ , bright and wide, making him look boyish and it’s so—he’s just—

His ring is on her finger and she’s, like, _so_ in love.

“Ta,” he thanks her as Buffy hands him the novelty mug, holding is steady and out of her way as she settles onto his lap. The leather recliner creaks as she gets comfy against his chest. “Got any nibblies for yourself?”

Buffy leans back a bit further, wiggling into place. Spike’s arm goes around her, holding onto her waist and keeping her pressed against him, and she marvels at this feeling of _rightness_ , at how they fit like they were made to go together. Like how Ken goes with Barbie. Like peanut butter and jelly, or chocolate ice cream and chick flicks, or...other matchy things.

“Not hungry. Too excited about the wedding.” Buffy sighs dreamily, picturing it in her head, the whole fairytale dancing across her vision. She bets that Spike will look totally hot in a suit.

He makes a noise of agreement and kisses her temple softly, lips feather-light against her hairline. It’s so gentle, tender in a way she never knew Spike could be. Her heart lurches in her chest and her cheeks go red because she knows he can hear it, the uneven rhythm betraying his effect on her. She glances up at him shyly, and the look on Spike’s face is enough to unleash a horde of fluttering butterflies in her belly.

“Please, _please_ , don’t start making out again,” Xander groans. “My poor eyes can only take so much abuse.”

“Might be able to help you out, mate. I know a demon who eats eyeballs.”

Buffy elbows Spike in the ribs for her friend’s sake but has to bite her lip to hold back a giggle.

Sobering up at the nasty look Xander shoots her fiancé, Buffy sighs. “Xander, you’re going to get used to me and Spike being together. We’re getting married! We’re going to be together for the rest of our lives—”

“—forever and ever,” Spike promises, his voice a deep rumble in her ear, low enough that she’s the only one that can hear, and Buffy’s breathing falters. His relaxed grip on her hip tightens, all gentleness gone, and the heat of his gaze sets her skin on fire.

Xander continues to moan on the couch with a confused Anya sitting beside him as Giles, blind and surly and even more confused, fumbles with some spellbooks in the corner. But they all fade away as Spike leans into her, resting their foreheads together for a single second before he kisses her.

Willow chooses that moment to burst through the door like a whirlwind. When they’d begun to suspect that the witch had done something to Giles and Xander—and Buffy too, the others claimed, but that was crazy-talk—they’d spent a good twenty minutes trying to get ahold of her. Apparently, she’s seen the messages left on the dorm phone because she’s got her arms full of herbs, spices, and other magicaly ingredients.

“Thank God!” Xander leaps up, jostling his girlfriend who’d almost fallen asleep out of boredom.

Buffy and Spike exchange a mutual look.

“—did spell—got stuff to fix—so, so sorry—” the red-haired witch pants, shouldering the door closed. Willow’s breathing harshly, and her hair is in complete disarray as if she’s been running.

Giles bumps into a bookshelf as he tries to maneuver himself across the living room. “Quickly, Willow. Apologies can be done later. Now, we need you to right your wrongs before the incantation I put up to protect us from Xander’s demon problem wears off.”

“Then we can have orgasms in peace,” Anya says cheerfully. “Not that I mind being watched, but I’d rather not be attacked while naked. Although…”

Willow scrunches her nose up, placing her items down. “Ugh, doesn’t she have an off button?”

“Willow, priorities,” Giles urges the witch to focus. “The spell?”

“Okay, okay, right, sorry. But I think we should have Buffy here too...I don’t know if what I said to her worked the way it did on you guys but—”

“Oh, it worked,” Xander remarks, shuddering.

“Spike and Buffy are getting married,” Anya supplies helpfully. “And they also left.”

Xander blinks, wildly searching the small living room like he expects the two blondes to be merely hiding behind the TV cabinet.

Willow gulps, twisting her hands nervously. “Where’d they go?”

“I wonder if they’re having orgasms,”Anya says thoughtfully. “I wish _I_ was.”

Giles sighs heavily.

***

They’re walking though Restfield Cemetery holding hands, her left in his right, and he’s left-handed (she learned this from when they’d begun to write out wedding invitations earlier) and it’s _perfect_ , because if something fangy pops up then they can punch it and probably stake it without even letting go of each other. He’s just the right to be able to hold her hand comfortably, to kiss her without either of them straining their necks—not like Angel, where they were always reaching for one another, never quite able to close the distance. How symbolic. A memory of Angel disappearing into the mist flashes across her mind, and a sliver of pain slices through her chest.

Spike tugs her to the side, jerking her out of her thoughts before she can crash into a gravestone. Buffy winds up pressed against his chest, one hand over where his heart had beat in another life, in another place.

“Steady on, pet. The bloke’s already had a spot of bad luck recently bein’ dead and all, no need to add insult to injury and trample him, yeah?”

She glances down. Buffy can’t feel any tinglies besides Spike’s, but she wants to be sure. “Is he _dead_ dead?

Spike tilts his head to the side, listening. After a moment, he nods. “As a doornail.”

Buffy sags against him further, nestling her face in the space between his neck and shoulder, Her arms circle his torso under his leather coat. “Good. I’m tired.”

He returns the embrace, cheek resting on top of her head. Spike swallows and Buffy watches in fascination as the muscles in his pale throat move.

“Slayer’s knackered, eh? Long day at the office?”

“Yup. Professor Walsh assigned a load of homework for the weekend. School sucks.”

Spike snorts. “Beats bein’ chained to a bathtub, I’ll reckon. You know, I would have been right brassed off if you’d’ve killed me there—imagine it, William the Bloody, the fuckin’ Slayer of Slayers, stabbed in the bath like that git Marat.”

Buffy lifts her head up. “A rat? Where?”

He sighs. “Didn’t you ever bloody go to class at Sunnydale High?”

“I tried! I was busy, like, saving the world and stuff. And it kept getting attacked by _some_ people who got _impatient_ and didn’t wait for Saturday,” she poes him to accentuate her point.

“Just couldn’t stay away.” He smirks, pinching her ass as Buffy lets out a shriek of laughter and ducks out of his arms.

She feels him come up behind her and turns just in time to avoid the kick he’s sent her way.

“Spike, what the heck are you—hey, your chip didn’t go off!”

“Don’t wanna hurt you. Guess it picks up on intention. Thought I should try, after I pinched you and nothin’ happened. This is bloody brilliant!”

She wraps her arms around her middle. Somewhere across town, Buffy suddenly remembers, her friends are plotting to take her fiancé away from her. “Still...I don’t really feel like fighting.”

“We’re not fightin’, sweetheart. Sparrin’, yeah? Dance with me,” Spike encourages.

He’s gone tense, the lines of his body rigid, ready to attack, and he’s smirking, but his eyes are warm. Love. He _loves_ her, she can see it all over the way he’s looking at her. She’s always been taught that demons can’t love, but Spike does all these things that he isn’t supposed to do, and it always, _always_ , has thrown her off-kilter since that moment when he’d melted out of the shadows behind the Bronze years ago. Spike loves her. They're getting _married_. It takes her breath away. It makes her feel invincible.

Buffy charges him.

They get lost in the waltz of battle. The chip fizzles, sometimes, when he gets a hit in that hurts more than he’d been anticipating, but mostly his intention of sparring let’s them bypass his handicap.

Misjudging where she’s putting her feet, Buffy trips over a fallen tree branch, and Spike grabs her, spins her so she’s back upright even as he sends a swift jab to her shoulder. She ducks, he misses as they both knew he would, and she lets out a laugh that’s been bubbling in her chest. Spike grins at her. This is fun, Buffy realizes. Fighting has always been something that she’s had to do for survival or during training, but here she doesn’t have to be a hero, and she doesn’t have to hold back, and it’s just Spike and Buffy, round and round, circling each other until she’s not sure where she ends and he begins.

He’s faster than her. But, in the end, she’s just a little stronger and a little luckier, and she manages to wrestle them to the ground.

Spike’s panting even though he doesn’t have to breathe. Buffy can feel the movement as she straddles his waist. She holds his arms down over his head in the grass, her thumb brushing softly over his inner wrist, and her grip is loose enough that he could break it if he wanted. But he doesn’t. He stares up at her in that intense way of his,  brightening his eyes. She wants to take a picture of him like this, sprawled under her, hair wild from where the gel has been disturbed, vulnerable and open and _hers_ , and she wants to carry it everywhere.

“I’m very in love with you,” Buffy whispers solemnly. She wants to say more, but she’s never been very good with words.

Spike inhales sharply, makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat, so quiet that she wouldn’t have heard it if her entire world hadn't narrowed down to just him. “ _Buffy_ ,” her vampire says, and her name comes out of his mouth like he’s telling her a secret, something important, something _precious_. Then he’s surging up to kiss her, shifting her on his lap, and there’s this hardness suddenly between her legs, thrilling and heady in the way it awakens something in her, and she rolls her hips experimentally as Spike’s tongue slides against hers.

He mutters a curse against her lips. “Christ, Buffy. You have no idea what you do to me, love,” he grunts out and she shivers with something that has nothing to do with the cold breeze.

Though, not that she’s thinking about it, they _are_ outside, and it’s kinda windy and dirty and very unromantic. Her cute new pants are gonna have grass stains all over. Ew.

“Let’s go,” Buffy decides, standing up and holding her hand out.

Spike stares up at her, uncertain. “Back to the Watcher’s flat? They’re only gonna pull us apart, pet, you heard ‘em. They think we’re together because of some voodoo your witch did.”

“Well, they’re wrong. We’re in love. We’re getting married,” Buffy stubbornly replies. Her friends and Giles will come around...eventually. Right? “They didn’t approve of Angel at first either.”

Spike knocks her hand aside and stands on his own. His jaw ticks like it does when he’s grinding his teeth. “Leave that git out of this.”

Buffy huffs. “Fine, sorry! I was just trying to make a point.

Spike grumbles and she sticks her tongue out at him for being a moron. She’s not sure what the big deal is, but she _had_ gotten totally territorial when Spike had casually mentioned Drusilla earlier, so she’s can’t really blame him for being jealous of the mention of her ex. Buffy feels a little guilty, especially now that Spike’s arms are crossed over his chest and he’s turning away from her. Her heart twinges.

She goes up behind him, hugging him from the back and resting her cheek against the smooth black leather of his coat. “Love you,” she reminds him. “Even if you’re a great, big _idiot_ sometimes.”

Spike laughs, and the sound of it makes Buffy a little breathless. She feels him relax again.

“I love you more,” he tells her, and it really never gets old, hearing him say those words.

“Then let’s go. Not to Giles’ apartment...I wanna go home.”

They hold hands, her left in his right, all the way to Revello Drive.

***

Her mom is away on a buying trip for the gallery, so all the windows at 1630 Revello Drive are dark. Buffy takes the keys from under the welcome mat, ignoring Spike’s amused smirk at the obvious hiding place, and opens the front door. She hasn’t been home in awhile since starting college and she’s missed it, the feeling of home. Happily, she leads the way inside.

She’s turning around to invite Spike in when she realizes that he’s already inside and shutting the door. Huh. The Scoobies have never revoked his invitation. Does this mean she’s loved him a little bit all along? Buffy’s memories on the matter are a bit fuzzy and she can’t be sure. When her feelings for the vampire started is a mystery—all she knows is that earlier today, when he’d gotten down on one knee, all of a sudden she’d been certain of one thing and one thing only: Spike was hers and she was his. And yet Xander’s words replay like a broken record in her head…

“Do you think they’re right?” Buffy voices her doubts, biting her lip, glancing down at her shoes. “Is this from Willow’s spell? I mean, it’s kinda crazy how we’re in love all of a sudden.”

In the darkness, Spike squeezes her hand, his other one coming up to lift her chin so that she meets his eyes. “Is not. Love, you’re the only bloody thing that makes sense in this whole soddin’ world.”

Mouth dry, Buffy tries to swallow. “O-okay,” is all she can manage to say.

They’re very close now, breathing the same air, and it’s impossible to know which of them moves first before they’re kissing, consuming one another, bodies pressed together from head to toe. Spike’s gentle at first, soft and searching, but then she bites his bottom lip _hard_ , hard enough to draw blood, and he growls deep in his throat. He tastes like smoke with his tongue in her mouth, dark and heavy, and he smells like leather and soap and _Spike_. It makes her dizzy. Her breath hitches when he forces her against the wall. His fingers sweep along her jaw and she tightens her hold in the curls at the back of his neck.

“Upstairs,” Buffy gasps out, and when he scoops her up into a bridal-carry, Buffy loops her arms around his neck as the room momentarily spins.

In her bedroom, Spike sets her down, nose nudging against hers. He’s being careful again, afraid to scare her away.

“Buffy…” He’s looking at her bed. “Are you sure, pet?”

She’s not naive. Buffy knows what they started downstairs, where they’d end up when she decided to bring him to her house. She knew even as they exchanged that look back at Giles’ and decided to sneak out the bathroom window. And she wants this, wants him. She wants her friends, her doubts, her unhappiness to remain far away, all the way across town. Buffy’s spent so much time lately at school feeling out of place, and in the time since Angel left feeling unlovable, but here and now, all of that is vanishing.

She wants to make love to her husband.

“Wait a sec,” Buffy tells him before heading over to her vanity.

“Can’t we accessorize later?”

“Just hold on...here it is!” She riffles through her jewelry box until she finds what she’s looking for, holding up the ring triumphantly. It’s silver, too big for any of her fingers except her thumb, and she’d worn it in LA sometimes. She walks back over to Spike and presents it to him.

“What’re you—?”

“I, Buffy Anne Summers, take you, Spike, to be my lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.” She licks her lips nervously, heart racing a mile a minute, sick with worry that he’ll laugh at her. “Kiss the bride, please?”

Spike looks dazed, dumbfounded, mouth slack like someone’s just punched him in the gut. There is one long, horrible moment where Buffy holds her ring, her heart, out to him and worries that he won’t take it. But then he does, he slips the silver band onto his ring finger, and his eyes look a bit watery.

“I, William Pratt, take you, Buffy Summers, to be my lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part...and maybe not even then,” he mumbles, kissing her lips, then her nose, forehead, her cheeks, and her hairline.

Feeling emboldened, Buffy shoves the duster off his shoulder and the sweetness of their embrace turns to heat all at once. Spike’s black t-shirt goes next, and Buffy has the thought that she really should have put it in their vows for him to always be shirtless because _man_ , he’s been holding out on her. She runs her hands down his pale, smooth chest and delights in the way his abdomen ripples under her palm. Spike’s own hands are up under her tank top, the pads of his thumb skimming the underside of her breasts beneath her bra.

Without warning, he tears the garments, bra and shirt both, off of her and her gasp pierces the gloom. Her chest heaves, giving him quite the show, and his nostrils flare. Fire swirls in her belly, pools between her legs. Before he can touch her again, Buffy strips out of her pants and tosses them in the hamper. She’s just in her underwear now, which, let it be known, are not as cute of frilly as she wants them to be but Spike doesn’t seem to mind. At all. And it doesn’t really matter anyway because they’re off soon too, thrown somewhere in the vague floating darkness of her room with his black jeans.

Spike maneuvers them onto her bed, licking a line down her throat. Her vamp tingles add to her shiver as he nibbles her skin lightly with human teeth, kissing downward over every inch of her chest. One of her breasts he’s fondling in his left hand, calloused fingers stroking against her sensitive flesh, as his tongue circles her other peaked nipple. Buffy tugs at his hair, nails digging into his scalp as she moans.

Her vampire’s smile, when he glances up at her, is wolfish.

“Like that, do you?” His hand trails a path down over her ribcage, her stomach, to where she’s achy and wet. “Where else does the Slayer like to be touched?” he whispers in her ear.

Buffy swallows noisily as his fingers drift over her pussy. “There, right _there_...Spike…”

He likes it when she says his name, Buffy can tell by the way he thrusts against her hip, his hard cock trapped between their skin. He brushes her clit and she arches up into his hand. He teases her there, making sparks shoot up her spine before he nudges her legs further apart and slips a finger inside.

She’s so wet that it goes in without any difficulty, and Spike adds another finger, pumping in and out of her several times as Buffy chokes on a moan, clutches at his shoulder.

His voice is low, rough, as he speaks endearments into her neck. “I’ve dreamt about you,” he tells her, “like this, _just_ like this. All spread open for me, pretty cunt around my fingers, around my dick…”

Buffy lets out a whine, the heat in her lower belly tightening even further.

He lifts his head, watches her squirm and pant like he’s trying to memorize every look that flashes over her face. Spike sounds feverish and wild when he starts talking again, like he’s barely even sure of what’s coming out of his mouth. “There she is, that’s it, sweetheart, that’s my girl— _fuck_ , you’re so beautiful, so warm, gonna set me on fire, Buffy—come for me, there you go, baby, let me feel it—”

His words, his talented fingers, the look on his face all coax her over the edge and send her spiraling into the stars.

***

“We can’t wait any longer!”

“What if they’re on their way back? Maybe just a few more minutes?” Willow asks of the room, but she figures she kind of lost her Scooby voting privileges for the week. Oops.

“I vote now. As in, immediately. ASAP, if you prefer it in acronym form,” Xander says from his spot by the Window. He’s been nervously watching the foot traffic outside to see if his status as demon magnet has returned since Giles’ rudimentary protection spell is wearing off. “Captain Peroxide could have his fangs in her right now.”

“I loathe to say this on principle, but Xander’s right. Let’s do it now,” Giles states firmly, standing from the couch. HIs authoritative tone is only a little undermined by the “ouch!” he lets out when he stubs his toe on the coffee table.

As the three of them hurry to prepare the ingredients for the reversal spell, Anya yawns.

***

Boneless and sleepy, Buffy’s floating through the clouds when an insistent nudge at her hip reawakens her arousal. Spike’s planting little kisses over her eyelids, and it makes her heart do this weird spasm thing. She wants to consummate their marriage. Right now.

She loops her arms around his neck and presses against him, her breasts crushed against he hard plane of his chest, and she feels the rattle of his laugh when he sees that she’s returned. He’s smiling down at her, eye’s crinkled at the edges, the harsh lines of his face softening in the dark.

“There’s my girl,” he murmurs, same as before, and Buffy remembers the dirty, delicious things he’d whispered to her as she’d orgasmed.

Having only just gone back to their normal color, her cheeks flush red again.

“Hi,” Buffy giggles. She closes the small distance between them to peck the corner of his mouth, opening her legs so that he can further settles on top, his dick cradled in the valley between her hips. “Ready for the main event?”

Spike’s eyes light up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. We still need to consummate our marriage, dumb-guy.”

“Bloody hell. No need to tell me twice,” the vampire grins, rolling them over.

Suddenly, Buffy is very much on top. She clears her throat primly. “Um...I liked it before.”

“Before what, pet?”

“Well...it’s just…”

 _“I’ve never done it like this, been on top”_ would probably sound so lame to a guy who has been having sex for, like, a hundred years. Yikes, now there’s something she totally doesn’t want to think about _ever_. She’s done the horizontal tango a full two times and both have ended in major disaster—okay, so the Parker ordeal wasn’t exactly word-ending level, but it really sucked, alright? Ugh. And the fact that Spike had been witness to both fallouts seems beyond embarrassing to her now. Her life is so unfair.

Spike has always had the weird ability to sense things about her when nobody else can. And for once Buffy’s grateful for this, because he seems to get her hesitation a second later. He sits up, but when she makes a move to get off he holds her still in his lap.

“I’m right here, Buffy. I’ve got you.”

Like this, with her sitting on his thighs, they’re exactly the same height, and it’s less scary in this position when he’s inches away instead of beneath her. Buffy melts into his kiss as Spike guides her hips. Her breath hitches when she feels the prodding at her slick entrance. His hands help her rise up, and then, steadying herself by holding onto his biceps, she lets herself slowly sink down on his cock. Halfway, Spike groans into her neck, bucking up so that she stretches over the remaining length of him and their hips slap together

A gasp gets caught in her throat, her eyelids fluttering. It’s so different than all the other times, deeper, hitting spots she didn’t even know were in her.

“Holy _fuck_ , you’re tight,” Spike mutters, something that might be awe making his voice sound raw.

He lets her get used to the feel of him, but the fingers that dig into her waist tremble and she knows he wants badly to move, yet he lets her set the pace. Buffy raises up a bit, then sinks back down. She looks to see where their bodies are joined. She’s never had sex above the covers before.

“Like this?”

He puts a piece of hair behind her ear, a crooked smile on his face. “Just like that.”

The next time she sinks down, Spike thrusts up to meet her, igniting the fire in her veins, and all at once they’re moving together, meeting in the middle, connected beyond skin as they stare in wonder at each other. The bed starts to squeak in protest from their rapid movements just about the time Buffy’s thighs start to shake, and she throws her head back, Spike sucking at the spot behind her ear, when the room momentarily glows bright with magic. They fall flat on the bed on their sides, him still inside her. Buffy’s hips are still rocking slightly with muscle memory, seeking to reach her release even as the spell fades away and her eyes widen in terror.

“Sp-spike?”

_Stop. Don’t stop. I don’t know. Do something, anything, please._

She feels him hesitate, then keep moving, thrusting in her harder and faster than before. Buffy looks up at his face. His eyes are closed

“Just...just pretend. Okay?” he grunts out.

“Okay,” she whispers, her vision blurry with tears.

All that happiness, all _her_ happiness, from only moments ago vanishes and leave her feeling cold, lonely, even with Spike right there. Buffy feels like someone’s reached into her chest and ripped her lungs out.

 _Pretend_ , that’s what Spike had said. Buffy closes her eyes.

She feels his hand between her legs, middle finger rubbing her clit in circles as he does something absolutely obscene with his hips, twisting so that he’s hitting some hidden spot deep inside her that makes her scream and claw at his back. As she’s clenching around him, Spike comes with a roar and collapses against her.

A tear slips down her cheek.

He carefully extracts himself, rolls off her. Buffy knows he’s looking at her, can feel the prickle of awareness, but she doesn’t dare open her eyes.

“Slayer—”

She meets his blue, blue eyes. Buffy wishes he would show his demon face, it would sure make things easier, remind her of who he is, _what_ he is, but Spike has never made her life easy.

“Get out.” Her voice is cold, brittle. It seems to echo around the bedroom.

Spike stares at her, and his face changes, closes, like shutters over a window. Something about it makes her ache. Buffy remembers vividly the way he’d looked at her when she’d told him that she loved him in the cemetery and has to choke back the urge to cry. Only when she hears the door slam does she curl into a ball and let herself sob.


	2. Chapter 2

She doesn’t tell Giles or Xander or even Willow. Anya, somehow, seems to know that  _ something _ went down during the spell, but apparently had developed some resemblance of tact because she doesn’t do anything more than throw Buffy knowing glances every one and a while during Scooby meetings. Which is annoying in its own way though, and puts her on edge.

Overall, however, Buffy tries to get things back to normal. Willow bakes cookies and apologies a bunch of times, and Buffy does her best to smile, to go to class, do her homework (kinda), call her mom, hang with her friends, and live out the remainder of the week in the same routine as she always does. She avoids Riley like the plague though, darting out of the psych lecture hall before he can corner her and ask her out on another picnic. It’s not like she doesn’t  _ like _ Riley, per say. He’s a decent guy, good arms and all that. It’s just...the thought of being with him now makes her stomach flip, and not in a good way. Maybe, in another universe, they could date and do nice, normal things, but here in this one Buffy’s got other things to worry about. Like, for instance, where a certain bleached menace has disappeared to.

It’s not like she wants to see him, of course. Buffy’s just curious, _ obviously _ . It’s her duty to keep tabs on vampires, even if they are chipped and unable to hurt people and have really nice cheekbones and — woah, let’s not go there.

“You just miss the idea of being in love,” Willow tells her, comforting her one night in the dorm. The witch doesn’t know the full details of how very groiny she’d gotten with the evil undead, but Willow does know about the engagement part. “That’s why you’re all mopey and confused.”

“Totally,” Buffy agrees. She tries to swallow past the lump in her throat.

She’s clad in a pajama set, brushing her hair, and as WIllow leaves the dorm room to go brush her teeth, Buffy lets out a frustrated sigh. When she next sees Spike — and she will, she’s sure of it — she is so gonna kill him for making her confused and conflicted, for making her feel... _ things _ . 

Buffy glances out the window and thinks she sees a speck of orange in the darkness as someone lights up a cigarette on the lawn outside her building.

***

The next evening, while patrolling campus, the back of Buffy’s neck tingles. She pauses, the heels of her stylish yet affordable boots sinking into the grass, squinting through the trees. The sky is devoid of moon and stars, and she’s far enough from the lights of the dorm buildings that her surroundings seem almost black. She can’t make out any movement...but that doesn’t necessarily mean nother’s there. Stupid human eyes. Why do vamps get super-vision while she’s stuck with normal non-nocturnal vision? Ugh.

Buffy waits a few moments just to see if anything fangy or demony is gonna pounce, but it seems like whoever is lukring wants to stay hidden. Whatever. Buffy huffs and continues walking.

But the tingles remain, a familiar itch just at the top of her spine, and a presence that hovers just on the edge of her Slayer radar while she finishes patrol. It’s like that the day after too. And the day after, and the day after.

After a week, she calls him her shadow buddy.

***

On patrol with her shadow buddy, Buffy has a lot of time to think. There are mysteriously no vampires around campus lately, and she wonders if her new friend is helping her out. Even though she knows it can’t be, knows it isn’t, the way he follows her kind of reminds her of the way Angel stalked her early on in their relationship. Wait, no, no, not stalked — stalking is  _ way _ bad and Angel’s not...well, he did kinda follow her around…

Buffy turns around. “Angel? Is that you?”

A growl rises from the darkness. She waits and waits and waits, but nothing happens after that. She shrugs and heads back to the dorm.

The next morning, there’s a dozen half-smoked cigarettes in the dirt under her window.

***

Willow forces her to go to a frat party on Friday night. Buffy sighs, but follows suit and slips into an outfit—not too much, just the right amount of slutty—and reminisces about the days when her red-haired friend was the one who wanted to stay in on weekends. Willow has blossomed in college, fitting right in with the academic types, going to all sorts of clubs, all the while maintaining top grades. Buffy’s happy for her, she really is, but a the same time she can’t help but feel a little left behind. It seems like everyone has their own thing now, has found their niche, except for her. 

She looks at herself in the mirror. “Oh well,” Buffy mutters to herself, “at least I still look cute.”

On their way out, Willow locks their door and Buffy has to use all of her Slayer reflexes to get them to the staircase without getting bumped into by drunk cheerleaders. The hallway is complete pandemonium as weekend festivities kick off and the poor RA tries to wrangle the unruly freshman. “This is an alcohol-free zone!” he’s screaming, but despite his best efforts, he’s no match for a horde of party-hungry teenagers.

Buffy and Willow giggles to themselves as they dash out of the fray.

“We’re definitely living off-campus next year,” Willow says once they’re out in the fresh night air. Willow’s already got her schedule for the next four years mapped out, probably already has an apartment picked out, and Buffy, well, hasn’t even written the English essay that’s due at midnight.

Buffy makes a vague noise of agreement to pacify her friend, but secretly she feels more lost than ever. It’s not like she’s always been Commitment Girl, but since being Called it’s hard for her to plan for the future...since any moment she might not have one. In the back of her mind, there’s always this looming knowledge, the thought that she could die at any time, and that it’s naive to make plans when she’s got a sacred duty that comes first. In high school, no one else was doing their work, no one was making future-plans, except for Willow, of course, but now in college, she’s not the only one...in fact, now  _ Buffy’s _ the freak because she won’t make a resume or do other adulty things.

Caught up in her whirlwind of gloomy thoughts, she lets Willow’s chatter about the Wicca club and her new friend (Tanya? Tara?) fade into white noise as she scans the row of trees that borders the path leading to the cluster of frat houses. Somewhere out there, she can feel her shadow buddy tagging along. It makes her feel a little better for some reason.

Buffy snaps back to attention when the music spewing from Lowell House reaches her ears. Inside, the party is already raging, lot’s of well-dressed, clean-cut guys mingling with groups of girls in short skirts and skimpy tops. A guy from the football team is handing out shots in the corner as a girl Buffy vaguely recognizes from psych class is making out with a frat brother by the stairs. 

“Willow,” Buffy says, spotting a familiar TA from across the room, “what are we doing here?”

“Getting out groove on!”

“Aren’t there any other frat parties? Or…”

Crap. He’s spotted her. Riley bids farewell to the two guys he’d been talking to and starts to weave through the crowd toward the front door. Where she is. 

“I thought seeing Riley would make you feel better!” Willow replies, confused, glancing at the approaching Riley. “You still like him, right?”

_ “I’m married,” _ she almost says, but catches herself just in time. God, what is wrong with her? In her mind, Buffy pictures the engagement ring Spike had given her where it sits in the top drawer of her dresser at home, hidden by her underwear. She just can’t get rid of it, not yet. 

As Riley blocks their path, panic rising in Buffy’s throat and Willow gives her an odd look, clearly wondering what the heck is going on. 

“Hey!” Riley says, oblivious to the tension. “I’m glad you guys came. I wasn’t sure if...well, obviously you did hear because you’re here...so…”

He smiles, touches her arm, and it’s too much. 

“Actually,” Buffy blurts out, “I was just leaving.”

Willow blinks. “But—”

“I have this essay due at midnight,” she explains, backing up. “So I really gotta, um, dash. I’ll see you at the room later, Willow, and Riley… uh, bye!”

And with that, she’s gone.

Buffy knows she’ll have to majorly make it up to Willow in the near future, but for now the relief she feels at speed-walking away from the frat house is worth it. Besides, Buffy grumbles to herself, all this is Willow’s fault in the first place for casting that damn spell. For making her do  _ things _ with Spike, things that won’t leave her alone, that haunt her dreams and her mind. She wants to feel disgusted and violated, she wants that so, so bad, the simplicity of it, how easy it would be to just be grossed out and get over it. But no matter how much Buffy tries to summon those feelings they just won’t come. Instead, she just replays it over and over in her head, their time being engaged. She’d just barely gotten over the breakup with Angel, and then the hiccup with Parker, and then for one wonderful night she’d been so blindly, beautifully happy that it almost breaks her heart to think about it now. Buffy wasn’t sure, after all her failed romances, if she was even capable of loving or being loved, but then Spike had shown her everything she was missing, had soothed every doubt, had made her whole. Except that wasn’t really Spike and man, she needs some therapy or something, right, because this can’t be normal behavior? She can’t keep obsessing over what happened, reaching for him at night when he will never, can never, be there. Not that he would want to be, either.

_ You just miss the idea of being in love.  _ Yeah, that’s all. 

Buffy sits down in the grass. She’s halfway back to the dorm, buts he doesn’t feel like walking anymore, and there’s no one around, so she flops back against the ground and stares at the stars and hates herself for being the stupidest girl in the whole world. 

She feels her shadow buddy nearby. Buffy keeps her eyes closed as he approaches. He’s almost completely silent, in stealthy vampire mode, but she hears the rustle of fabric as he bends down to sit with her. His presence is a balm to her frazzled nerves.

He touches her cheek lightly with his knuckles, so brief that she could convince herself that it’s the wind. She could, but she doesn’t.

***

Buffy stands in the shadowy hallway of Sunnydale High, which is fundamentally wrong for some reason...but she just can’t remember why. She’s in her pajamas, the same ones she went to sleep in, but she feels different somehow, older and younger and exactly the same all at once. Goosebumps spread along the back of her neck, tinglies alerting her to the presence of a powerful vampire behind her. Turning on her bare heel, Buffy faces her adversary.

_ Spike _ .

“I’ll tell you what,” he’s saying, and the movement of his mouth gives her a brief view of sharp white teeth. There’s something vicious about him, something she hasn’t seen in a long time. “As a personal favor from me to you, I’ll make it quick. It won’t hurt a bit.”

The words come from somewhere within her, a script she can’t quite remember: “No, Spike. It’s gonna hurt a lot.”

He tilts his head. She’s startled when he demon mask fades to his human features. His eyes are startlingly blue, too human.

The floor, the entire high school, rumbles and sways and cracks.

“What’s another word for ‘gleaming’?” Spike wonders aloud in a weird version of his accent, and then he’s burning, flames and fire, bright as the sun, effulgent—

Jolted awake by the shriek of her alarm clock, Buffy takes a shaky breath. The dream stays with her as she gets dressed, gets ready for class, and it  _ scares _ her. It had been too real for a normal dream, too vivid, practically palpable. A Slayer dream. She hasn’t had one of those in quite a while. And it shouldn’t freak her out as much as it does, after all, side effect of her job is to have nightmarish dream encounters with vampires, but Spike…

Buffy’s never had Slayer dreams about Spike, not even back when he first blew into town as the resident Big Bad, kidnapping her friends and terrorizing Parent-Teacher Night, not even when he had the gem of Amara and was practically invincible. So why now?

Well, Buffy knows why. That stupid,  _ stupid _ spell. It’s lingering somehow, it has done something to her, he has done something to her, wiggled under her skin and into her dreams  and — and —

It’s unacceptable. Something has to be done, she decides. Immediately. 

***

“Buffy, what on Earth are you doing?”

Apparently, her instincts have been compromised as well as her dreams, because she hasn’t even heard Giles approach from behind. Damn. 

“Oh, Giles! I thought you were out.” Buffy forces a laugh. “I was just, um, looking for some books.” Trying her best to look innocent, she hides the spellbook behind her back. 

Giles, clad in a brown fuzzy bathrobe, had seemingly just woken up and is not, clearly, out doing...whatever it is that he does during the day now that he’s unemployed. She tries not to fidget under his stern gaze.

“Books? Giles says slowly, dubiously.

Buffy shuffles her feet. “Yes,” she says, nodding seriously in a way that she hopes is convincing. “College has really taught me to...appreciate pleasure-reading.”

Giles sighs. The jig is up.

“You’re hiding a spellbook behind your back, Buffy. Why? And don’t say pleasure-reading.”

Buffy scrambles for something else to say, some other reason why she would barge into his home and seek a forgetting spell. “Okay, okay, fine. I just...wanted to help Willow, that’s all. She’s still sad about Oz, so I thought making her forget about that would be...good?”

“Haven’t we learned by now that we can’t cover out problems with magic?”

Well, what the heck is she supposed to say to that? It’s not like Buffy wants to tell her only father-figure that she got down and dirty with everyone’s least vampire, and even if she tries to play it off as wanting to forget the engagement part her face will be so red that Giles will totally know that something is up. He always knows. And Buffy is definitely not prepared for  _ that _ kind of conversation. Demons, vampires, monsters; sign her up. But discussing sex stuff with Giles is one thing she will  _ not _ do.

She puts the book back where she found it on the shelf. She’s wiping her hands off on her maxi skirt, wondering how all of Giles’ books seem to be perpetually dusty when he’s always reading and researching them, when he asks, “Have you seen any sign of Spike since Willow’s spell?”

Buffy freezes. The room seems small, suffocating, suddenly.

“No,” she says as casually as she can, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “I haven’t. Maybe He’s taken the hint and finally left town?”

Giles shuffles over to the kitchen in his slippers. “Perhaps. But I think not. He wants that chip out of his head, as you know, and I’d wager that he’ll stick around until he finds a way to remove it.”

Uncomfortable, Buffy bites her lip. This is what she gets for skipping class.

“Yeah. I guess.”

“If you happen to find him while on patrol, do try and make him give you more information about the organization that took him. We need all the intel we can get.”

If she sees Spike she’ll be too busy breaking his nose to ask him much of anything, but Buffy just nod at her Watcher. They say their goodbyes and she’s out the door before she can glance (again) at the leather recliner in the corner of the room.

***

She goes to her afternoon classes and tries her best to pay attention, but her thoughts keep wandering. In her dream, Spike had burned, and it has seriously wigged her out. She imagines that he would want to go down fighting, fists and fangs. But then Buffy remembers the soft looks he’d given her, the way he held her, when they were engaged and under the spell, and she can’t ignore that there’s more to Spike than the demon. That still doesn’t really explain anything though. Ugh, stupid cryptic Slayer dreams. She never knows what they mean until it’s almost too late.

By the time Buffy finishes dinner with Willow in the dining hall, she’s antsy. It’s just past dark and she can’t wait to get out on patrol to unleash some pent-up energy. She’s tired from her sleepless night, but there’s a prickling along her skin, buzzing in her ears, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. Something bad is coming. The urge to go out and find what is is overwhelms her, but Buffy manages to fight it off until later, leaving the dorm around ten o’clock.

The night is warm even for California standards, but she shivers as she ventures farther from the middle of campus, wrapping her arms around her middle and wishing she’d worn a sweatshirt or something. The sky is bright, full moon beaming at her and washing out the surrounding greenery in silvery hues. Buffy runs into a boy who, on Monday, is still drunk from partying on Saturday. Rolling her eyes, she steers him toward the cluster of freshman dorms over the hill and continues on her way.

A familiar tingle strokes her neck like a caress. Her shadow buddy has arrived. Buffy doesn’t stop walking, doesn’t look behind her, but she can feel him and it makes her shoulders relax just a little. The comfort he provides is short-lived.

The kick he sends to her back is brutal, too quick for her to react. They both cry out as she falls.

She hadn’t even registered him getting closer, but now he’s right above her, looming, and Buffy struggles to breathe after having gotten the wind knocked firmly out of her. Looking up, her eyes clash with his angry yellow gaze. Standing in front of her is Spike in full armor: faded black jeans, black t-shirt, red button-down, leather coat gleaming in the low light, hair slicked back, fangs out.

“Why have you been lettin’ me follow you?” Spike demands. He looks so  _ furious _ — but she refuses to be afraid.

“Why are you following me in the first place?” she yells, and the force of it stuns them both.

He clenches his jaw. “Kept bloody waitin’ for you to go to that club in town. Wanted to do this the right way, you and me, we met there, so I figured I’d kill you there in that alley too, for the sake of symmetry and all that rot.”

He’s lying. There’s something in his face...he’s lying, she can tell. Symmetry? Yeah, right.

Buffy snorts, ignoring the way it makes her back twinge. “How poetic of you.”

Something very violent comes over his face. He looks lethal, unhinged,  _ desperate _ . But he doesn’t hit her. His head must still be pounding from kicking her earlier. 

Slowly, like one would move as to not spook a wild animal, Buffy gets up. They stand three feet apart, staring at each other, breathing heavily.

“Why are you really following me, Spike? You can’t kill me. The chip will zap you before you can get the job done.”

He glares down at her for a long time. A howl rips through the night, far off in the distance. Buffy shivers, bites her lip, and Spike inhales sharply. Against the darkness and his black clothing, his hair and skin seem paler than usual in the moonlight, and his eyes, after he releases his demon face, are impossibly blue.

Buffy stifles the urge to touch his arm.  _ Stop it _ , she tells herself.  _ He’s an evil vampire and he hates you and you hate him (right?), and he’d kill you in the blink of an eye if he could.  _ Except...he’s kind of had a lot of changes, hasn’t he? Her mom and an axe never should have stopped him. He should have snapped her neck the minute he’d found her wallowing after the Parker ordeal. And all those other times...why hadn’t he killed her?

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, “ Spike spits. “You’ve  _ ruined _ me, you _ bitch. _ ”

And Buffy’s head spins, no idea what to even make of that, and she doesn’t have time to analyze because less than a second later a growl erupts from the foliage behind them and a creature leaps from the bushes in a blur. A werewolf, large and feral, it’s brown hair slick and matted with blood. It stares them down with wild, haunted eyes.

Crap. With Oz gone, she’d completely forgotten about the hazards of a full moon, and now without a crossbow Buffy has little hope of defending herself without getting bitten. This is  _ not _ good.

“Don’t move, you’ll spook the beast. It’s injured,” Spike whispers to her, shooting her a glance over his shoulder. She hadn’t seen him move but now he’s closer to her, standing a bit between her and the wolf.

Heart pounding, Buffy takes a step toward the vampire as the werewolf growls again. Spike’s eyes flicker to her, but he doesn’t say anything. His head is tilted to the side, like he’s listening…

“Bollocks. There’s somethin’ else comin’.”

Soldiers, a whole damn squad of them in camo and with guns at the ready, come jogging from the trees.  _ God _ , Buffy thinks with morbid humor,  _ what a circus _ . 

Chaos explodes, then. The werewolf, who had seemed to be calming down, roars and charges the commando guys and Spike, who’d gone uncharacteristically still, snaps to action all at once.

“Is that them, the ones who took you?” Buffy asks, but Spike’s grabbing her hand and dragging her behind him without replying.

“Just run.” His voice is hard but she can hear the fear in it, so she does.

They take off down the hill and into the denser forest. Buffy’s not sure why Spike seems so worried, the soldiers had been after the wolf, had barely even seen them, but then she hears the footsteps crashing through the underbrush and she runs faster. They have super-speed on their side; they move through the trees in a blur. But it seems the soldiers aren’t completely human either, because they manage to keep up somehow. Slowly though, Spike and Buffy start to lose them. While trying not to trip on any fallen branches, she keeps her eye on the vampire by her side, that slash of black and white against the grey of the forest.

The blast of a gun closeby startles her, makes her stumble. Through the adrenaline, she almost thinks its her that’s been shot until Spike howls and goes to his knees. Breathing in heavy bursts,she races over to him, trying to stifle the surge of panic. Guns freak her out, okay? What’s wrong with a good old fist-fight? People these days…

She doesn’t even get to reach Spike, because someone’s grabbing her from behind, and Spike vamps out, bites at the soldiers who come at him as Buffy struggles to get free. With her arms trapped, she takes a page from his book and bites the hand around her mouth until blood dribbles down her chin. She only lets go when a sharp instrument pokes at her nape. Everything turns inside out and then completely black. 


	3. Chapter 3

White. Blinding, horrible, sickly; brightness everywhere, hurting her eyes even through her eyelids. Buffy covers her face in an attempt to keep out the fluorescent light, letting out a whimper when the movement sends sparks of pain down her side. Her Slayer senses alert her to the presence of a vampire in the room but she knows it’s only Spike without having to look. Further...her radar picks up on more vamps nearby, though they’re faint and it’s strange-feeling, the way the tinglies barely tickler her neck.

Her sense being dulled sends a sliver of fear into her gut, reminding her too much of unpleasant events in the past. Has she been drugged?

Flexing her fingers, then her toes, Buffy keeps her eyes closed and slowly, meticulously, takes inventory of her injuries and tests her lack of strength. She forces herself to take a deep breath.  _ Not totally powerless _ , she soothes herself,  _ not like the Cruciatum _ . Just a little under the weather. Well, that’s fine. Not ideal, but she’s done more with less. 

Spike lets out a little huff and her eyes fly open. He’s laying a few feet from her, unconscious, with harsh lines indented in his forehead as he frowns and shifts during what she presumes is a bad dream. He looks unbelievably pale, almost blending in with their white surroundings, and under the glaring lights, the scar on his eyebrow appears more pronounced. Buffy’s fingers twitch with the desire to trace it. She gets distracted by his lips, cracked and a little bloody in the corner of his mouth where she assumes he’s been punched, and he’s mumbling something, something that might be her name.

Buffy swallows, the dryness of her throat making her grimace.

Spike settles further into sleep, the creases on his forehead vanishing as whatever plagues him disappears and he sinks deeper into the realms of sleep. Buffy watches him because, hey, it can’t do any harm if he doesn’t catch her...right? It just fascinates her, that’s all, the way Spike is so expressive. How can a demon feel so much?

An unknowable time later, Spike opens his eyes, groggy and uncertain, pupils turning to pin-pricks under the brightness. Sleepily, he smiles a bit when he recognizes her, one side of his mouth quirking up into not quite a smirk.

“Hey,” he says quietly. His voice is hoarse and scratchy from disuse, and it’s so intimate in this strange place, so unexpected that it makes her stomach flutter.

“Are we dead?” Buffy asks.

The spell is broken. Spike blinks, remembers where they are,  _ who _ they are, and the lingering dream clouding his eyes dissolves instantly. Buffy almost regrets ruining it when he shifts away from her, but then he’s glancing frantically around the room and her chest tightens with dread.

“Motherfucker,” Spike moans. “I can’t believe this is happenin’  _ again _ .”

She licks her lips, looks around. The floor, ceiling, and three walls are pristine white while one is translucent, made of glass, showing them a view of another cell, an empty one, across the hallway. When she looks closely, Buffy can make out a piece of equipment in the top left corner. A camera.

“They’re watching…?” Buffy whispers. 

Are they listening too? Should they even be talking? Why isn’t mind reading or telekinesis a Slayer power? Or even teleportation? Yeah, that would be pretty handy right about now.

Spike lets out a string of curse words, some of which she’s never even heard before or are in some language she doesn’t understand. It would be kind of impressive if she wasn’t totally wigging out. 

Buffy stumbles to her feet, channeling the churning fear in her belly into irritation. “Ugh. Creepy, much? Giles used to videotape my training sessions so that I could watch them later and, like, improve my technique or something, and I thought  _ that _ was weird — this is a whole new level. We left Weird three exits back, passed Alarming, and are hurtling down the highway at 95 MPH toward Nightmare-ville.”

Spike stands as well, shooting her a look. “You’re an odd bird, you know that?”

She shrugs. “Back at ya.”

Shaking his head like he can’t believe he has to put up with her, Spike moves toward the glass wall. 

“Oi! Come on you wankers, you’ve already shoved your gadgets in my noggin...why don’t you come in and bloody fight me, see how well they work, yeah?”

Buffy wonders if Spike would be able to kill someone fast enough that it would work before the chip disabled him. Drinking would take too long, but maybe snapping their necks? But it seems to sense intention somehow, stops him before he even really gets to the deed. Still, Spike is as stubborn as she is, and right now he’ll probably zap his brain to mush before letting these guys have their way with him again.

Feeling a little sick, Buffy lifts her hand to the back of her head, feeling around for a bump or an incision. Have these soldier guys done something to her, implanted something in her head too?  Oh God, oh my God—

Spike bangs his fists on the glass. Buffy yelps in surprise when he gets electrocuted for his efforts. What the heck kind of torture chamber is this?

“Spike, we have to get out of here.  _ Now _ .”

“Sure, kitten. Lemme just whip out my master key and unlock the door — oh wait,” Spike sneers at her, but some of the venom fades when he recognizes the rising horror she’s feeling.

Buffy places her trembling hands on her hips and lifts her chin, refusing to let her posture show how afraid she is even though she knows its  _ written _ all over her face. She glares up at the camera. 

“Let us out! I have a sacred duty, how  _ dare _ you lock me up here. You guys have no idea who you’re dealing with.”

“Might wanna listen to her. She has a funny way of always comin’ out on top,” Spike says, and  _ no way _ does she miss the little innuendo he’s thrown at her, the reminder of their night together.

Her cheeks grow hot. “Shut up, Spike.”

“What?” He holds his hands up in mock surrender. His face is the picture of innocence, but his eyes glitter with mischief. “Just tryin’ to back you up, pet.”

Buffy splutters. “Well, I don’t need you  _ backing _ me into anything!”

He smirks, curling his tongue behind his teeth in a way that should be illegal in all fifty states. His eyes flicker over her body. “Yeah, we’ll see.”

It’s freezing cold down here, and that, Buffy tells herself, is the only reason her nipples harden to scrap against the thin fabric of her halter top. She really needs to get better patrol outfits. She feels practically naked, and the way Spike keeps eyeing her doesn’t help.

“Stop it,” she hisses, crossing her arms over her chest, face turning red with rage and... _ just _ with rage, okay?

And then he starts laughing, reminding her exactly of why she hates him  _ so much _ , and Buffy feels like an idiot so she lashes out, marches over and decks him right in his stupid chiseled jaw. There’s more power behind it than was perhaps necessary; he crashes across the room, head cracking against the wall. Buffy feels satisfied until she sees that the vampire’s been knocked unconscious and realizes how very much alone she is now, left to fester in this cell. Buffy glances up at the camera, stares at it for a long time, willing someone to come let her out, come talk to her,  _ anything _ , but when nothing happens she just sighs, goes over to the back wall and sits near to where Spike is a heap of black leather. 

Buffy’s never been the most patient of Slayers, and so she fidgets and grows more and more agitated as time goes on, hours blending together. Everything is white, white,  _ white _ , and she has no way of knowing what time of day it is, how long they’ve been here, and it makes her head hurt. Buffy pulls her legs up against her chest and rests her head on them, and then, allowing herself a moment of weakness in this crazy place, she scoots closer to Spike. They’re not touching, not at all, but she could reach out and grab his angle if she needed to, if something were to happen. Just in case. 

***

The heavy silence lasts until Spike wakes up. She’s kind of, sort of...relieved, until he starts cursing at her. 

“You cunt,” he growls and calls her a slew of other terrible things. “I’ve been bashed on the head so many bloody times lately I’ve probably got brain damage."

“Would be an improvement,” Buffy mutters, watching Spike sit up and glare at her. 

He hunches in on himself. In demon face, with his fangs reflecting the harsh lights, he looks very much the caged animal that he is. “Be careful how you speak to me, little girl. This chip can’t protect you forever — see how you feel when I shove the end of a pistol down your throat.”

Buffy grits her teeth. “Screw you.”

Spike barks a laugh. “You already did,” he tells her, and she’s seriously  _ so _ close to staking him except...Mr. Pointy is gone.

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath.  _ No weapons, no friends. What’s left? Me. _

Crossing her legs, Buffy tries to meditate like Giles taught her, hone her Slayer radar to see if she can sense how far underground they are or where the other demons—

“What, you got nothin’ else to say to me, bitch?”

No stake. But she could, maybe, choke him with her hair? Or rip his head right off his shoulders? Or shove her hand into his chest, past his ribs, and tear out his heart? That would be fitting.

Instead of any of that, she ignores him because she knows it’ll drive him nuts. Buffy hopes that the government or whoever has captured them shows up soon and kills him. Except, uh...maybe not, because then she’ll be stuck here  _ alone _ , and Spike’s at least gotten out of this place once. He’s pretty crafty when he wants to be. Or, more likely, it had just been dumb luck, but she can’t really take any chances with her own safety.

Buffy’s stomach emits a loud rumble that fills the room and she’s suddenly, painfully aware that she’s starving.

She looks at Spike wearily. “I’m guessing this place doesn’t offer a free continental breakfast?”

He snorts. “Didn’t see it in the brochure.”

She hears something mechanical moving and looks up quick enough to see two blood packets fall from the space in the middle of the ceiling. The hole shuts and clicks into place a moment later. Buffy stares at them, confused.

“She’s human, you gits,” Spike calls. But there’s no answer, no acknowledgement; nothing.

“They think I’m…?”

“Looks like. Morons.

Buffy watches him, waits for him to dive for the blood and drink. But he doesn’t. His eyes are red-rimmed and bluish veins stand out beneath his skin, creating little spiderwebs beneath all that ivory, and he looks... _ wrecked _ . To be fair, Buffy’s sure she doesn’t look so hot herself right about now dirt smeared on her skin and hair tangled from the scuffle in the woods, but at least she’ll admit that she’s hungry. Spike, however, looks at his food like it’s personally offended his mother or something.

Feeling her gaze on the side of his face, Spike looks over at her. “It’s drugged.”

She gulps. “These people are roofying demons? Why?”

“Experiment on ‘em, I guess. I drank from one of these last time and woke up with this bit of plastic in my head. Don’t fancy a repeat.”

Buffy freezes. No way are these people going to experiment on her. She’d rather starve. Even if they give her human food, she decides she absolutely won’t eat it, ever. Her traitorous stomach chooses that moment to growl again and Buffy wonders how long her resolve will hold out.

Sneaking a furtive glance at the camera, Buffy crawls over to where Spike is. She can tell he’s wigged out by how close she’s gotten, but she ignores it. With eavesdroppers, personal space is a luxury that they can no longer afford. She leans in against his ear, facing the wall while he faces out to the room, hoping to the camera that it looks like an odd embrace. 

“How did you get out the first time?” she murmurs, so soft that she herself can barely hear, but Buffy knows her vampire companion will.

Spike mouths something. Frustrated, she moves closer. Vamp super-hearing should also be a Slayer thing, Buffy decides. And when she gets out of this mess she is definitely writing a strongly-worded letter to the PTB. 

He sighs, and his breath is cold against her cheek. He presses his lips against her temple, bottom lip brushing the shell of her ear, and Buffy holds still, trying to keep her breathing even. “Pretended to drink. And when they came in...element of surprise, yeah? Doubt that’ll work again, though.”

“Who were you sharing a cell with then?”

He pauses, like something has just occurred to him. “No one. All the demons I saw had their own little slice of hell. 

Buffy stares hard at the wall, picking at a hanging piece of skin near her thumbnail. “Then why are we in here together?”

His nose is in her hair and he’s close, so close,  _ too _ close, a dangerous mockery of how he’d nuzzled her when they’d been engaged, in love, under that horrid spell. “ _ You’ve ruined me _ ,” he’d said, right before everything had gone bad. Her heart skips a beat at the memory.

Buffy twists, turning her head to the right. He’s  _ right _ there, looking at her strangely, like he’s never seen her before, like he can’t really believe they’re sitting together like this. Buffy can’t believe it either, how these things keep happening, how they keep getting thrown together again and again.

“You helped me save the world once, do you remember?”

“Yes,” Spike simply says. His face is unusually unreadable, and compared to his normal near-constant state of movement he’s remaining still as a statue, not moving a muscle, as if rooted to the spot.

“I told you to leave and then you came back. Again and again.”

Nobody ever comes back. So many important relationships have ended with her watching people walk away. The realization makes her eyes stinge.

“Yes,” he says again, carefully. “Just couldn’t stay away.”

The echo of another conversation hits her like a punch to the face. She struggles to suck in a breath, her whole chest aches—

Footsteps approach from the distance, and with a mutual look, Spike and Buffy leap to their feet. She shoves their chat out of her mind, though she can’t ignore the way her skin hums when his knuckles brush against her hand for a fraction of a second.

“Six of ‘em,” he mutters, rolling his shoulders and shifting on his feet.

Buffy nods. “Truce? Until we get out of here?

Without hesitation, Spike nods, and gives her a look that kind of says  _ “duh” _ .

She can’t help but smile faintly. However, any of the relief she’d been experiencing is shattered when she gets a glimpse of the first soldier to appear in front of the glass wall of their cell.

_ “Riley?” _


	4. Chapter 4

_ “Riley?” _

The last time she’d seen him outside of class was the awkward encounter at the frat party. He does  _ not _ look happy to see her. His eyes flicker over her face and then away. As the woman in the lab coat says something to the five college-aged guys in military-style camouflage, he presses his lips into a thin line, staring hard at something a little over her shoulder so that he doesn’t have to look in her the eye. 

“You know him?” Spike’s demanding of her, eyes narrowed in accusation, and Buffy doesn’t even know what to say, what to do, her head is spinning with this new development and she has to pinch herself on the arm just to make sure all of this isn’t just some wonky, horrible nightmare.

The woman raises the lapel of her lab coat and speaks into the microphone clipped to the stark white fabric. “Hostile 17, can you hear me?”

“The name’s Spike,” he snarls. “I  _ earned  _ that name, you hear me, fuckin’ use it.”

The woman writes that down, but Buffy’s still looking at Riley, unable to fathom how her psych TA has wound up...wherever they are. It kind of pisses her off too, how he doesn’t even have the balls to look at her.

Buffy takes a step closer to the glass, crossing her arms over her chest in a way that she hopes is intimidating. “Wow, Riley, secret government agent, huh? You’re really taking the extra-curricular activities thing to a whole new level. I would have just joined the psych club if I were you, but hey, that’s just me.”

“Hostile 17B, refrain from addressing — ”

Buffy doesn’t hear the rest. Because not only is Riley here, but, in the most fucked up class field-trip she’s ever been on (and she’s been on some bad ones),  _ Professor Walsh _ is present as well, staring at her calmly with a clipboard in hand. She looks like a mad scientist in that lab coat, and Buffy takes a step back, running into Spike’s chest.

She jerks away from him, but the vampire grabs her arm to steady her. 

“Slayer, what the fuck — you know these tossers?”

Her growing terror makes it hard to think. Have Riley and Walsh been watching her all semester, taking notes on her, waiting for their chance to snatch her? What could they want with her? Or is she just a casualty of them wanting Spike? Is all of the psychology department down here, cutting into demon brains? Oh God, do they want  _ her _ brain? 

Bile burns the back of her throat. “I thought I did.”

Spike now seems satisfied that Buffy’s not somehow in on all this madness because he lets her cling onto his coat sleeve while she tries to get herself together.

“Wait, 17B? I don’t even get my own number?” Buffy grumbles, glaring at Walsh.

She had felt sympathy that first day when she learned people called her the “Evil Bitch Monster of Death”, but now the title seems quite fitting.

“It is a temporary label. I am not yet sure what species you are.”

“I’m human, you freak! Like you. Except,  _ not _ ...because I don’t kidnap people!”

“Yet you keep company with a vampire.”

_ “I’m the Vampire Slayer!” _ she wants to scream, but something stops her. Would Walsh use the information against her? Separate her from Spike and throw her in another cell, alone, with no hope for escape?

Buffy’s still feeling the effects of the drugs and is definitely not game for fighting off an army right now, even if they are human.  _ Are _ they even human, though? She remembers in the forest how they had kept up with her and Spike’s super-speed, and the thought she’d had about how maybe they weren’t exactly as human as they seemed. Super soldiers? What in the name of the PTB is going on?

“She’s not a vampire  _ yet _ ,” Spike supplies when it’s clear Buffy is unsure of how to answer. He sneaks her a look — _ just go with it _ .

And then, because she’s obviously gone insane, Buffy turns to Walsh and nods. “We’re getting married.”

The professor blinks. Then slowly, like a horror movie, she smiles.

“You’re in the process of being turned into a vampire, Hostile 17B? For...romantic purposes?”

Riley looks shocked, breaking the professional mask he’s been sporting, and Buffy smiles in victory.  _ Serves you right, asshole. _

Buffy flips her hair, somehow managing to look haughty even though she’s covered in grime and dirt. “Totally.”

Walsh looks triumphant, scribbling on her clipboard. “Fascinating. We’ve never observed the transformation...worth losing the werewolf…” Looking up, she motions for them to continue.

Buffy swallows, her confidence wavering. What have they gotten themselves into?

“Don’t feel much like talkin’ ‘til we’ve had somethin’ proper to eat,” Spike snaps.

Reminded of her growling belly, Buffy nods. “And I, uh, still need human food.”

The professor says something to Riley, but her mouth is away from the microphone so Buffy can’t hear. Riley looks almost frantic as he responds to his mentor.

“Agent Finn requests you to be moved to your own habitation unit while we prepare your mean. Will you comply?”

Buffy and Spike move closer together. “Absolutely not.”

Professor Walsh tracks their movement hungrily. She says something to the squad of commando guys and then is walking away, and Buffy makes the mistake of exhaling in relief, thinking they’ve crossed an obstacle, but then the glass door slides open and a taser-gun is fired at them both, hitting her in the shoulder.

Buffy falls to the floor, shuddering, and hears Spike thud down beside her before passing out. 

 

***

Buffy wakes up, but instead of the whiteness of the underground lab she is in a cavern. Candles flicker in the dark, carving out the crevices in the crumbling walls and illuminating several large puddles of dirty sewage water. Buffy is alone for one single heartbeat before something else comes into view — a young girl in a white fairytale dress floating, facedown, in one of the black pools. It is a scene that’s familiar, a glimpse of something from years ago, an echo of her girlhood, an aged memory that haunts her sometimes, surging up from wherever old fears hide themselves. 

Her death. Some small part of Buffy wonders if, like the prophecy promised, things for her should have ended here.

“Have you heard about Mr. Pratt? They call him William the Bloody because of his bloody awful poetry.”

Buffy spins around, bare feet slipping on the wet stone as she searches for the source of the accented voice. There in the shadows, a dead man floats in another puddle, dressed in fancy Victorian clothing. She can’t see his face, not from this angle, but Buffy knows him…

“It suits him,” a different body-less voice says. “I’d rather have a railroad spike through my head than listen to that awful stuff.”

Buffy watches the faceless man and then her younger self, the puddles in the Master’s cave turning into a vast ocean, the black water swirling, swallowing the bodies back into the past.

She turns. She’s in another place, another time, a different life.

A nightclub in Rome, somehow Buffy knows this. Surrounded by a group of admirers, she lets the music flow through her limbs and mix with the buzz of alcohol that fuels her wild dancing. A ma n— dark hair, tanned skin,  _ all wrong _ — presses up against her back, hands sliding down to rest at her hips. 

This Buffy is older,  _ harder _ . Her suitor twirls her and Buffy keeps spinning even after he lets go, round and round, like one of those carousels she’d ridden at the pier when she was a kid in LA. Little Buffy had gripped the pole with sticky hands, watched the world blur and all the people become faceless, wondering with all the innocence of a child if the horse she clung to minded that he was skewered. This older Buffy, she feels like that horse, pierced right through her middle and on some sick ride she can’t get off of. Somehow, someway, she’s lost everything.

Her dress flares around her legs, sweat runs down her spine. A scream that’s been building in her chest for months is released in violent giggles, clashing with the techno-pop music. The other dancers probably think she’s a drunk lunatic, but their faces swirl together and become meaningless, a sea of strangers. The lights change as the song ends, and suddenly, the dance floor lit by the new brightness, Buffy catches sight of a flash of white among the dark-skinned Italians. Pale hair, paler skin, the familiar shape of a man weaving through the crowd away from her. 

Buffy stumbles. Her heart stops, stutters, then starts to beat at twice the normal speed.

_ “I love you,” she whispered. _

_ His eyes were on fire. “No you don’t, but thanks for sayin’ it.”  _

She moves as if in a trance. Pushing through the mass of moving bodies, Buffy wills the room to stop tilting as she tries to keep him in her sight. All she gets is glimpses, there and gone, as she makes her way toward the back of the nightclub. Kicking the door open that leads to the alley, she goes out into the narrow passageway. It’s dark here, and the rest of the club seems very far away. The music is still loud though, thumping through her bones, vibrating around her skull. 

Panting, Buffy tries to call out his name, but her throat is clogged up with emotion. She mouths it instead — _ Spike, Spike, Spike _ — a chant, a chorus, a prayer. 

But there’s no one in the alley, no matter where she looks. Spike is dead here, just a ghost. Buffy closes her eyes, slumping back against the grimy brick wall, unable to breathe properly, overwhelmed with grief. 

 

***

 

When she opens her eyes, she’s in a bright cell, and she’s herself again, not that older Buffy in Rome. The feelings that had seized her in the club fade; that profound sadness, mourning the loss of her home, her family, everything she’d ever known. And Spike...for some reason. Why does he keep dying in her dreams?

Buffy frowns, remembering the man floating in the water. 

_ “They call him William the Bloody because of his bloody awful poetry.”  _

William the Bloody. That dead guy was Spike too, or Spike before he was Spike. He was...a poet? 

_ “The name’s Spike. I  _ _ earned _ _ that name…”  _ he’d growled at the professor.

_ “I’d rather have a railroad spike through my head than listen to that awful stuff.”  _

Buffy shivers and sits up.

A stab of panic pierces her chest as she looks around. Spike is gone and she’s alone in a new white room. It’s bigger than the other one, with a sink and toilet at the right and a narrow cot pushed up against the back wall. There’s a blanket made from UC Sunnydale colors folded neatly on top of her new bed, Buffy discovers as she goes to investigate, and it’s so similar to the one Willow had bought on the first day of college that looking at it makes her eyes water. A broken sob swells in her chest, and Buffy curls up on the cot, facing the wall, and lets herself weep. She cries for herself, locked in a cage. She cries for her younger self, dead at sixteen. And she cries for that other Buffy too, all that rage and grief around her heart

She dozes in and out, eyes red and scratchy. Her stomach grumbles every once in awhile, but Buffy tries to ignore it. This cell has a lot more foot-traffic than the other one; men and women in lab coats who she doesn’t recognize pass by the glass door sometimes, not even glancing at her as they hurry off to wherever they’re supposed to be, probably doing evil sciency stuff.

Time is meaningless here. She thinks hours have gone by since she woke from the dream, but it could be just minutes, or it could be days. The lights never dim, and without the sun or a clock, she is disorientated (which is probably the point). So it’s unknowable, really, to wrap her head around how long it takes before someone comes for her. Eventually though, the door slides open and Buffy opens one eye warily. 

Riley, dressed in fatigues, holds a tray of food in his hands. He’s alone this time, and without a gun. He leaves the door panel slightly open. Good. He doesn’t see her as a threat, then. Big mistake.

But even though she’s itching to get the heck out of dodge, she has to be careful about this, can’t make a rash decision that’ll get her chained up and fed to a demon or something. She has to wait for the right opportunity to escape. 

Having been stifled and shoved down, at the sight of a meal, her hungry comes roaring back to life. Buffy pulls herself to a sitting position on the cot, gripping the metal edge of the bed with white knuckles as Riley slowly approaches. 

“Hi, Buffy.”

He’s smiling at her tentatively, that sweet smile he used to flash her in class when they’d lock eyes across the room. But whatever attraction she’d felt for him weeks ago had evaporated even before she’d gotten kidnapped and shoved into his freaky government lab, so if he thinks that innocent farm boy act is going to work on her  _ now _ , well, Riley Finn really doesn’t know who he’s dealing with. 

“Oh, it’s  _ Buffy _ now, is it? I thought I was a hostile.”

He frowns a little and stops a few feet away, uncertainty filling his features. Buffy very much wants to grab the sandwich he’s offering and throw it right in his face but, unfortunately, her stomach won’t allow it. Huffing a sigh, she takes the tray from him. 

Riley looks pleased. She glares at him as she shoves half the sandwich in her mouth, cheeks bulging out like a chipmunk.

“I’m glad I got you out of there.”

“Out of where?” Buffy absentmindedly replies, licking mustard off her finger. She takes a huge bite of the other half of the sandwich. 

“Away from Hostile 17. Buffy...I don’t know what it has told you, but you can’t trust those things — being a vampire is  _ not _ something you want to be. They’re horrible, evil,  _ wrong _ . I know you said you were already in the process of becoming one, but you’re still human now, and if there’s anything we can do,  _ I _ can do, to save you — ”

“I can save myself, buddy.”

Riley sighs. “You’re not listening — ”

“I’m listening! I’m  _ very _ much with the listening, you’re just not making any sense.”

He takes a step closer. His eyes are pleading. “My superiors want to document the process of becoming a vampire, we’ve never seen it and don’t have any idea how it works, but I don’t want you to become a...thing I have to kill.” 

Buffy pauses, licking the crumbs from her lips. She’s finished her meal but suddenly has to clamp down on the urge to spew it back up. “You’re going to kill me?”

“What? No, Buffy, no! I want to help — that’s the point, I  _ don’t _ want to have to — ”

“If you want to help me then let me  _ go _ , Riley! Let me out of here!”

Screw patience. Before he can respond, Buffy jumps to her feet. The plate and tray clatter to the ground, echoing through the room. She takes advantage of Riley’s stunned expression to bolt past him and out the open glass door. 

She hasn’t been injected since that first time and her strength has mostly returned, allowing her to put on a burst of super-speed and lose Riley as she sprints down the hall. Buffy skids around the corner, the soles of her sandals slapping against the pristine tiled floor. There’s no one in this hallway, nothing in the cells, and it all seems exactly like the one she’d just been in. Everything looks the same. It make her dizzy at just the thought of navigating her way to the surface. 

Her strength has mostly returned and with a burst of superspeed, she sprints down the hall. Buffy skids around the corner, the soles of her sandals slapping against the pristine tiled floor. There’s no one in this hallway, nothing in the cells, and it all seems exactly like the one she’d just been in. Everything looks the same, and Buffy gets dizzy at the just thought of navigating her way to the surface. It’s a labyrinth down here, except instead of muppets and a rockstar king there’s too-strong soldiers and a crazed psychologist who  _ really _ needs to find another hobby.

The harsh fluorescent lights above flicker and then go dark. Pitch-blackness obscures her vision for a terrifying moment until red emergency lights flare along the ceiling and the violent wail of a siren penetrates the air. 

“Not good,” Buffy mumbles.

She keeps running and turns down another hallway just as a group of armed soldiers arrive through a set of double doors. In this part of the underground lab, tinglies on the back of her neck alert her to the presence of vampires. One vampire in particular; Spike is nearby.

The commando guys in front of her lift their taser guns —o r are they real guns? She  _ so _ isn’t about to stick around and find out. Buffy charges them. They aren’t prepared for her to be so fast; she ducks under their arms and squeezes through the thick metal doors before they slide shut. Ripping the device from the wall that allows a keycard to swipe through to gain entrance, Buffy hopes it’ll slow them down a little. Or a lot. 

Her head aches with how loud the siren is, pain pulsing in the back of her skull. She lifts her hands to her ears, fighting the urge to cry as she realizes she’s just locked herself into a room with no way out. It’s some sort of observational chamber, a row of chairs facing a wall of glass that looks down into another small room below. 

Holy  _ crap _ , Spike’s down there. Blood coats the white walls, splashes of red, and he looks like he’s gone several rounds with a lawn mower. And lost.

Something bangs against the metal doors leading to the hallway. Heart thundering against her ribs, Buffy throws a chair against the glass. It cracks, but doesn’t shatter. Special glass, huh? Gritting her teeth, Buffy throws her fist against the translucent wall and watches shards rain down. She vaults into the room below and lands with the grace of a gymnast. 

Spike gets to his feet. She won’t even deny that she’s so happy to see him. 

“Come on,” Buffy says. “We have to get out of — ”

Spike lunges at her. Buffy’s back slams against the floor with the force of his impact, some of the glass shards poke through her thin top and prick her skin. He’s snarling, mouth full of fangs, feral and furious as he pins her beneath him. The chip isn’t going off and his hands close around her throat, grip hard as steel, and Buffy goes rigid with panic. She can’t breathe, can’t speak. Lack of oxygen makes her head feel like it's going to burst, darkness filling the edges of her vision — why is he doing this? Stupid vampire had promised her a truce!

Buffy thrashes, tries to buck him off, and then attempts a head-butt as a last resort. One of Spike’s hands comes up to push her forehead down and her vision swims, her view of his demonic face and wild yellow eyes going blurry. She feels a cool bit of metal on her sweaty hairline. His eyes flick up to look at whatever it is and some of the violence melts off his face. Spike shudders, then let’s her go. 

Taking a huge, ragged breath, Buffy forces air into her lungs, grimacing as she feels her abused windpipe protest. Her ears are ringing to match the sirens, and she’s pretty sure she’ll have a permanent headache from now on thanks to whatever sicko designed these wretched things. Buffy whimpers, curling onto her side, not even caring that the broken pieces of glass further cut up her skin. She wants to cry again. God, everything  _ sucks _ . 

A cold hand touches the exposed skin of her lower back. Feeling betrayed, Buffy glares at him with all the hatred she can muster.

“You said we had a truce.” She loathes how her voice wobbles.

Spike is crouched over her, head tilted to the side, still in game face. Up close, he looks... _ awful _ . He’s missing his duster and red overshirt, and his black t-shirt is practically ripped to shreds. Bruises marr the ivory of his skin, slashes cover his face. One particularly nasty cut runs from below his left ear across his throat and down to his right shoulder, like something had tried to decapitate him and missed (barely). It’s still oozing blood, and Buffy wonders how much of the redness on the walls is his. He doesn’t say anything to her, and she suspects that, to survive the wounds he’s sustained, he’s so far into demon mode that he couldn’t even if he wanted to. 

Instead, he leans over her and lightly presses their foreheads together. Her heart  _ lurches _ in her chest. 

Buffy can hear commotion around them, the noise of heavy booted footsteps approaching, and she loops her arms around Spike’s neck, pulling him forward so that all of him is laying flat on top of her. It probably aggravates his injuries, but he complies without hesitation, huffing a sigh of relief as he hides his face in her neck. His left hand cups the side of her face and she can feel his ring again, except no...now that she gets a look at it, that’s  _ her _ ring from when they’d —

Buffy swallows.  _ Oh. _

The group of soldiers, panting from running, appears in her side-vision and she closes her eyes. Buffy hopes they just shoot them or something and get it over with. 

“Hostile 17, release Hostile H1.”

Oh great, she gets her own hostile name now. Guess that means they intend for her to stick around awhile…

“Repeat. Hostile 17, release Hostile H1,” the commando guy demands. She knows him vaguely, probably one of Riley’s frat brothers, and it makes Buffy’s stomach churn with anger. 

Spike growls low in his throat. Buffy tightens her hold on him. 

“We’re a package deal. We’re getting married,” she reminds them, and honestly has no idea where the charade ends at this point. 

She does know this: if any of these guys tries to take Spike away right now, the only familiar thing in this wonky upside-down place, some bodies are about to hit the floor. 

“Leave them!” comes a woman’s voice. Professor Walsh steps into view. “This is absolutely riveting, we’ve never had a vampire couple before but this is beyond what I even — this could change  _ everything _ for my research — ”

“She’s  _ not _ a vampire,” another voice says. Riley — when did he get here?

Feeling nauseous, Buffy closes her eyes and conceals her face against the bulk of Spike’s shoulder.

“Not  _ yet _ ,” Walsh says to Riley, and there’s a demented sort of glee in her tone that Buffy does not like at all.

“We can stay together? Please?” Buffy asks weakly. She’s so, so tired. 

“Yes. I’ll make the arrangements. In the meantime…”

Being tased is not fun, and doesn’t get better the second time around. 


	5. Chapter 5

Buffy fades in and out of consciousness, the result of a mixture of heavy drugs and her bone-deep exhaustion. Strapped to an examination table, they prod at her, measure her, inject her with things until she feels feverish and shaky. But true to promise, Spike is always within her sight, restrained and examined by scientists in a bed only a few feet from her. He stares at her sleepily, golden eyes sliding shut and then back open in slow intervals. There are needles in her arms, tubes and wires and beeping machines all around, but she refuses to look at anything but him, refuses to give the lab coat freaks the satisfaction. Instead, Buffy memorizes every line of Spike’s face until she can see him even when she closes her eyes, imprinted on the dark inside of her eyelids. 

***

They get placed in another white room. Similar to her last one, it has a toilet, sink, and bed. This model has a shower though, and heaps more pillows and blankets, along with a few other luxuries. Buffy has never been so glad to see toilet paper in her entire life. 

Spike doesn’t wake up for a long time, long enough that it makes her uneasy. He breathes when he’s awake, for some reason, even though he doesn’t have to, and he’s always fidgeting, messing with his lighter or fixing his coat or tapping his fingers on something. Now though, he’s completely still. Spike’s usually pale, but he’s never looked more  like a  _ corpse _ . Obviously, he’s (relatively) fine because he’s not dust, but…Buffy remembers him, another him from a different life, dead in her dream. But then he shifts, just a bit, and she releases a lungful of air she didn’t know she’d been holding.

She curls up next to him, not touching, not quite, and pretends they’re somewhere else. The memory of her in the grass with her shadow buddy flashes through her mind, the lingering of Spike’s knuckles brushing her cheek. How long ago was that? It seems like a lifetime. She’d missed him, after the spell. She allows herself to admit that now. 

As she waits for Spike to wake, Buffy stares at the silver band on his ring finger. She knows he wears rings sometimes, chunky skulls and gaudy gems to go with his punk look, but the vampire has none of those now. Just the slim, simple ring she’d given him during their night together. 

_ “I, William Pratt, take you, Buffy Summers, to be my lawfully wedded wife…” _

“Who’s William Pratt?” she asks when he stirs, opens his blue eyes to gaze at her. 

There is a momentary pause, a monumental silence, a spasm in the side of Spike’s jaw. 

“He’s dead,” Spike replies casually. A beat later, he adds, “I killed him.”

“Was he a poet?” She already knows from her dream but she asks anyway.

Something that looks like fear passes over Spike’s face, but it’s gone so fast that she might have imagined it. 

“He was a fool.”

The ceiling opens. A bag of blood drops to the ground following a sandwich wrapped in cellophane and a bottle of water. With weakened muscles, they both stumble to their feet and head over to the food. 

Buffy takes a gulp of water and starts devouring her meal. Her jaw aches when she chews on the left side, but her whole body hurts, and so she doesn’t really feel it. Between bites, her mind wanders again. “You’re wearing my ring.”

Spike’s sitting cross-legged across from her, having drained the blood bag faster than she thought was possible. He looks slightly better, less ghostly. 

“Was gonna give it back to you, that’s why.”

She smirks. “Oh yeah? Just like you were waiting to kill me at the Bronze for,” she pauses for dramatic effect, “ _ symmetry _ .”

He sneers, flashing a hint of fang. “Bitch.”

“Freak of nature,” she responds, but none of the usual animosity is in it. Instead, there’s a weird fondness that twists her stomach when he reaches for his pockets, for a cigarette, and gets adorably annoyed when he sees they’re not there. 

Wait, where are his jeans?

“Our clothes are gone,” Buffy shrieks, glancing in horror at her own body to confirm.

Their normal clothes are indeed gone, replaced with light blue scrubs. 

“Do you think they…?”

He snorts out a laugh. “Eyed up your girlie bits?” 

Ugh. “Shut up, Spike!” 

Crossing her arms over her chest, feeling beyond violated, Buffy scurries to the bed in the corner and wraps herself in a blanket as if the extra layer will have prevented the removal of her old clothes. Professor Walsh is  _ so _ getting a bad teaching review at the end of the semester. 

“This is  _ so _ messed up! There isn’t even a curtain on the shower — these people aren’t scientists, they’re  _ perverts _ !”

“Atta girl, let ‘em have it, Slayer.”

Buffy freezes, turns around. “Don’t call me that,” she hisses, glancing around to locate the camera.

The humor disappears from Spike’s face. His eyes, made even more vibrant by the blue scrubs, flicker over the room. He gives the camera, a little black box in the corner of the ceiling, a two-fingered salute and then the middle finger as well for good measure as he makes his way over to where she’s huddled. 

Spike pulls her into a hug. Stunned, she’s about to protest when he places his lips against her ear and says, “So what’s our cover story then?”

“I don’t want them to know I’m the Slayer. They might not even know what that is but if they do...if they know I’m the only one of my kind…”

Well, there’s Faith of course, but even after everything, Buffy isn’t about to sell out her sister Slayer. 

“They may never let you outta here.”

Not like they’re going to anyway. 

“Yeah. So...let’s just stick with the couple thing. Professor Walsh seems to be into that, it’ll keep us alive and buy us some time, I think. Riley said they have no idea about the process of turning into a vampire, so we’ll just...make it up, I guess.”

“And say what?”

“That you’ve bitten me — ”

“Aren’t any fresh marks on you.”

Spike sniffs the Master’s bite and then Angel’s. She can feel him frown against her neck. 

“Okay, okay, um...I drank  _ your _ blood, which is why I’m strong, we’ll tell them that, and then...so to complete the transformation…”

“I bite you.”

Remembering how he’d attacked her in the observation room, Buffy shoves against Spike’s chest, putting distance between them. She can’t let herself forget that he’s just a demon on a leash. 

“ _ No _ way. And hey, speaking of — why the heck, does your chip not work anymore?”

“The blasted thing can turn off, apparently. Back where you found me, they had me tusslin’ with some of their soldier boys, and then there were other demons, one after the other, again and again, testing me I guess, it all sort of...blurred together,” he explains, eyeing her throat, and Buffy reaches up to feel the bruises, the lingering impact of his hands on her skin. 

She shivers, yelps and jumps inelegantly when Spike vamps out and surges toward her, only to jerk back with a howl.

“Just checkin’!” he tells her, ignoring the sharp glare Buffy levels him with.

“And to think I was just about to ask about your…” she waves a hand at the gash on his own neck. “ _ Are you okay?” _ she wants to say, but doesn’t.

“I’ve had worse. Blood helped,” Spike shrugs, but she can see how the movement of his shoulder pains him. 

Buffy sits down on the cot, not even caring that her skin is smeared with grime and it might sully the bedsheets. Spike sits on the floor by her feet. The room fills with silence, the faint buzz of the overhead lights the only sound. Spike’s hair is electric under the fluorescents, a hint of his brown roots starting to show at the base, all of it has come completely loose from the gel he favors. Spike has curly hair, she realizes, really curly. She’d seen evidence of it before, but to  _ know _ it, to have definite proof seems like such an intimate thing. 

Buffy reaches out to touch it before she knows what she’s doing, but then her fingers are in his hair and Spike sighs, leans against her legs. She traces where his hairline meets his forehead, then rakes her nails against his scalp, pieces of dried blood flaking off the white-blonde strands. The vampire makes a noise of pleasure, a purr in his chest that vibrates against where their bodies touch. Her lower belly clenches with...something that she doesn’t dare name. 

They get interrupted by Professor Walsh and her military goons. They’re acting like bodyguards, the two soldiers flanking her, as they follow her to stand in front of the glass panel door. Unlike Riley, they don’t come inside. 

“Hostile 17 and Hostile H1, approach.”

“This doggy doesn’t do commands,” Spike grumbles, but he and Buffy do as the woman says anyway. 

“I have some questions —”

“So do I,” Buffy cuts in, anger flaring in her stomach. “Who gave you the right to undress us, you perverted, voyeuristic  _ weirdo _ ?”

“Your old attire was falling off in shreds, and these scrubs are much more suited to the circumstances. A single nurse changed you. I can assure you it was all very clinical, and to everyone’s best interest.”

Spike barks a laugh, cupping himself through his pants. “Yeah right, as if you weren’t there with your nose pressed to the bloody window. Hope you got a good look, you frigid old maid.”

God, leave it to Spike to make everything so much worse. “You’re not helping,” Buffy throws him an irritated look.

“Is this it’s usual behavior?” Walsh asks, pen poised over her clipboard. 

Buffy whips her head around, narrows her eyes, offended on his behalf. “Spike’s a  _ he _ , not an  _ it _ .”

“Of course. And how long have you known him?”

“Couple years,” Buffy responds. Keep all the answers vague as possible, that’s the goal. And as close to the truth, so it’s easier for them both to remember. 

“And when did you find out he was a vampire?”

“I knew from the start.”

Walsh scribbles down everything with intense concentration. 

“And when did you begin your romantic relationship?”

Spike glances at her, his face unreadable. Buffy looks at the ring on his finger. “I don’t know, recently? It kind of just—happened.”

“Are you physically compatible?”

Buffy’s eyes go wide, her cheeks flaming red. Memories of their night together replay in her head in graphic detail, how their bodies moved in tandem, how Spike had known how to touch her. She gulps. “Uh…”

“I mean, does a vampire always pick a mate with a similar build? You’re both on the shorter side and—”

“Oi!

“Hey!”

“Alright, alright. Then why pursue a human? Why not just kill her?” Walsh asks Spike. 

He crosses his arms over his chest, glowering like a child who has been denied a favorite toy. “I tried. Didn’t take.”

Buffy smirks into her hand. 

Walsh’s eyes flicker between the two of them, then she writes something down. One of the soldiers that’s with the professor strikes Buffy as familiar, no doubt one of Riley’s friends. Forest, is that his name? They’d talked at a party once. Now, he looks at her like she’s an abomination. Will Riley, if she ever sees him again, look at her the same way?

Her hands are in serious need of a manicure, Buffy realizes, looking down. One set of knuckles has been wrecked by punching through the glass earlier, tiny glittering shards still embedded, blood and yellowish bruises blooming on her skin. Buffy stares at her hands as Spike tells her psychology professor about the story they’d agreed on, about how she’s turning into a vampire and the process will be complete when he bites her.  _ Hold up _ —

“Spike,” Buffy breathes anxiously, but it’s too late. 

“—why you gits need to turn the chip off, yeah? So I can get the deed done for you, show you how the whole bloody thing works,” he’s saying. 

“And then you’ll be a mated vampire couple? We’ll be observing the male-female dynamic of your species?” Walsh asks. She’s trying to remain professional but the growing excitement in her voice gives her away. The soldiers around her shift in discomfort.

“Sure, Doc,” Spike agrees. 

Buffy feels like she’s going to faint. 

A strong arm loops around her waist as her knees give out, holding her frozen body against a solid bulk of chest. She doesn’t know what else is said, how long it takes for Walsh to leave, but suddenly they’re alone again and Buffy crumbles. 

“S-sorry, this is—I don’t know why I’m so emotional—”

Spike hauls her against his side, turning her so that they’re face to face. “This place can make anyone loopy, pet.”

She sniffs against his blue scrub shirt. “I’m mad at you for what you said, that you have to bite me.”

“Gotta make sure the chip is off if we’re gonna fight our way outta here, yeah?”

She hates that he’s making sense while her head is spinning. She feels dizzy, out of control, hurtling towards something terrifying. Buffy wants to curl under a blanket and never come out.

Later, in a heap of blankets and pillows, she does just that—pulls one of the many coverings over her head and revels in the soft darkness, an escape from the abrasive white lights. Spike has set them up a nest in the corner of the room since the cot wouldn’t fit them both, and now he is right behind her, wedging her in-between his body and the wall. He’s got his arm over her middle, posture curved so that he’s almost spooning her. Buffy probably shouldn’t let him hold her like this but she draws comfort from the embrace; his presence is literally the only thing keeping her from falling apart at the moment.

Whether Spike is simply doing this for show, for Walsh’s cameras, is a mystery to Buffy. But she... _ isn’t _ . Some part of her wonders if she has crossed a line that she can never come back from. The spell was bad enough, but this...

Will she be able to make him walk away this time? Would he even want to stay, if she asked?

Stop it, she tells herself. Bad Buffy. It’s just this place, that’s all. Everything that happens in here stays here, and when they get back to Sunnydale things will return to normal. Because there’s just no way she can allow herself to have feelings for  _ another  _ vampire—

Buffy sucks in a ragged breath. Spike stirs, joining her under the blanket after a few seconds. 

“What’s goin’ on under here, then?”

She wants to tell him to go back to sleep, but instead Buffy blurts, “I miss my mom.”

In the dark, she feels his cool fingers against her heated forehead as he pushes her hair back from her face. “Mine too,” he whispers, voice rough.

The moment is so fragile that Buffy doesn’t dare breathe. 

All she can see of him under the blanket is a glimpse of his eyes, a flash of teeth, shadows. 

“Go to sleep, kitten,” Spike tells her, and they curl up together again. “Sweet dreams.”

“I try. But you keep dying in my dreams. So stop it.”

Spike laughs, deep and scratchy and  _ delicious _ , right in her ear. “As you wish.”

Sleep welcomes her like an old friend.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Can we rest now, Buffy?” - line of dialogue from 7x02 Beneath You.

It’s warm wherever she is. She’s laying on something lumpy—too small to be her bed at home and too uncomfortable to be her dorm mattress. But someone’s holding her, and so Buffy settles down again, content to drift back away into the bliss of unconsciousness. On the brink of sleep, she remembers the dampness in her underwear, the reason she’d woken up. Buffy lifts the orange blanket, peeking at her scrub pants, noticing the red patch on the crotch.

“Holy—Spike, oh my _God_ —they’ve done something—I’m _bleeding_ —”

Spike jolts awake, ripping the blankets off of them. Eyes blinded by the sudden flood of light, Buffy covers her face and whimpers.

“Love, I’ve been right here the whole time. No one took you.”

“Then what—”

Buffy pauses, swallows, tries to count the days in her head but has no idea how long they’ve been trapped in this hellhole. Well, she _does_ know now, because she’s gotten her period, due for two weeks from the morning when they’d been taken.

Mortified, Buffy rolls away from Spike to face the wall. “Nevermind.”

She hears Spike—sniffing her?

“Monthlies, eh? You didn’t know they were comin’? I could’ve smelled it a mile away.”

She shoves her elbow back into his ribs, satisfied when he lets out an “oof”.

“I can’t believe you can _smell_ that.”

“I’m a vampire,” Spike reminds her. “Blood’s kinda my thing, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“How could I when you keep _sniffing_ me!” she shrieks at him when he leans over again.

“Fuckin’ hell. Was only gonna wrap you up again, Buffy, no need to blame a fellow for helpin’.”

The use of her name makes her halt, angry words dying in her mouth.

“Sorry, I’m just…”

“Yeah,” he sighs, and she hears the rustle of fabric as he stands. “Look, I’ll leave you alone for a tick, get myself cleaned up, then you can have a wash when you’re ready to stop being such a _girl_.”

She glares over her shoulder, sticks her tongue out at his back.

“I saw that.”

“Good,” Buffy grumbles, cheeks pink from the whole embarrassing ordeal as she dives back under the mass of blankets.

She clamps her legs together and wills the floor to swallow her up, like, immediately. Slayers shouldn’t have to get their periods, she decides, on account of world-saving duties. Stupid sacred calling. Stupid mother nature.

The sound of running water fills the room as the shower built into the far wall splutters to life. She can hear Spike getting undressed, and it occurs to her all at once that he’s _naked_ , and only about  twelve feet away from her, _showering_ , water glistening over the muscles of his abdomen and down to his—

Whoa. Since when is her mind always in the gutter? Ugh, that delinquent vampire is rubbing on her—off on her! He’s rubbing _off_ on her, not—God have mercy.

Buffy keeps her eyes squeezed shut, waiting with bated breath as Spike slowly finishes with the shower and puts his scrubs back on. She keeps under the blankets and perfectly still until he calls her name, says it's okay to come out. Without a word, without even looking at him, Buffy throws a blanket over his head, says she’ll break his arm if he peeks, and hurries to the toilet.

Once she’s relieved herself, she grimaces at her soiled underwear, taking it off and throwing the scrap of lace in the sink, quickly pulling the scrubs pants back on.

“I need, um, feminine hygiene things, please,” she tells the camera.

Nothing happens, and she squirms. Best to get in the shower if they won’t give her any tampons—she’s not just going to bleed all over the room like an animal. But there’s no way in hell she’s getting nude in front of whoever’s watching. Buffy bites her bottom lip.

“Spike,” she hisses.

He appears from beneath one of the blankets. “You called, dearest?”

She rolls her eyes. “Just...come here, okay? Bring the blanket. I need you to…” she trails off, makes a motion of holding an imaginary shower curtain up.

“What do I get out of it?”

She clenches her jaw, ignores the way the left side of her mouth aches. “You get to remain non-dusty.”

“Right.”

They get in position.

“Don’t look.”

Spike smirks but doesn’t say anything.

She’s made him close his eyes and cover his face with the blanket as he holds it up for her, but she’s still paranoid about the whole shower thing. What if he can see her through the woven material? The camera most likely won’t be able to pick up anything of her, but Spike’s so, _so_ close—then Buffy remembers how he’s already seen her naked during the spell, almost a month ago now, and a little thrill goes down her spine. She’s hyperaware of him as she peels her scrubs off and gets under the spray of the water, shivering as a stream of cold cascades down her back. She soothes herself with the thought that worse, _far_ worse, than Spike seeing her vulnerable would be for Walsh to or any of the other crazed scientists watching through those dumb cameras.

Buffy cleans out the wound on her hand, picking out the last bits of glass and putting them down the drain, and washes out the other cuts on her body, though most of them have or are in the process of healing (one good thing about being the Slayer). She rubs at her face, taking off all the remnants of makeup and dirt before doing her best to wash the blood out of her tangled hair. There’s no soap or shampoo, just the water to clean with, but afterwards Buffy feels a million times better, almost like a person again. It feels weird to remember that she’s (basically) a human after so long being treated like a _thing_ by these lab coat freaks.

“Do you think they would let me drown myself in here?”

She’s joking, except there’s a bitterness to her voice that surprises even herself. Spike is quiet for a minute and Buffy wonders if he heard her until he finally speaks.

“I wouldn’t let you.”

She turns her face up into the spray. “I died once, by drowning. It wasn’t so bad.”

Buffy hears him shift, the blanket rippling. “You died?”

“Before you came to town, the Master bit me and then just...left me to the fishes, I guess. Angel didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

She sighs. It would be so much easier to just fade away...

“Buffy,” Spike says, weirdly urgent, voice thick with some emotion that she can’t begin to decipher, “don’t get a death wish on me. We’re gettin’ outta here, and that’s a promise.”

Why is her heart beating so fast?

“Distract me then. I told you how I died, now you tell me how _you_ died. Giles thinks you were a thug at the docks or something in East London and got ambushed there,” she says because the silence becomes too much, too meaningful. “But I don’t think that’s true.”

Spike laughs humorlessly. “Yeah? Well, the truth doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

When he doesn’t answer, Buffy twists the knob, turns off the shower. Wordlessly, Spike shuffles forward and puts the blanket around her like a towel. She notices that true to his promise, he keeps his eyes dutifully closed like the gentleman that she suspects he once was. It does something crazy to her hormones, yeah, that’s why she wants to hug him, and it takes her longer than it should to wrestle back the urge. Bad Buffy.

Even while trying to keep herself in check, she can’t help appreciating the curve of Spike’s ass when he bends over to fix their sleeping nest. _Crap._ She is _so_ screwed.

 

***

 

“Crap. We are so screwed,” Buffy whispers, echoing her earlier thought, as a squad of armed soldiers and a team of scientists appear at their cell.

She sends a wild, frantic glance at Spike. They haven’t discussed what they’re going to do, how they’re going to escape—she thought they’d have more time. But Walsh is apparently anxious to get to the main event, to see a vampire being made, to see two vampires mated, and the hourglass has run out.

Spike pinches her. Buffy lets out a startled yelp, but the vampire doesn’t react, doesn’t feel any zap. The two share a look. They’ve already turned the chip off.

“Now?” she whispers.

His mouth is against her ear, blocking anyone from reading his lips. “Not yet. There’s somethin’ building...magic in the air. Can feel it. We gotta wait.”

Buffy nods without thinking, without hesitating. She trusts him. She _trusts_ Spike. The thought should freak her out, but it steadies her, gives her strength as the soldiers enter and methodically strap them to gurneys. To make an already uncomfortable situation increasingly awkward, it’s Riley that fastens her wrists and ankles, though when she winces as the strap digs into the raw skin of her wrist, he does loosen the hold just a smidge. Both Buffy and Spike are still fairly weak from the drugs, but the brute dealing with Spike doesn’t seem so inclined to small mercies.

Since they’ve got Spike’s gurney behind her, Buffy stares at the ceiling as they’re wheeled down the hallway, watching the bright lights blur together, mind whirling as she comes up with a plan. In order to allow Spike to bite her, they’ve had to turn the chip off, which is a weight in their favor, but tipping the scales is how they’re probably about to be locked in another observation room with no way out. The entire lab down here is a maze, there’s little chance she and Spike will be able to navigate out of here without getting shot (or worse). And what was the vampire saying about magic? It’s all a hopeless, confused jumble.

Buffy stares at the lighting panels in the ceiling without blinking until her eyes start to water. She would do anything to be able to ask Giles what to do right now. Or Willow. Or even Xander, given he still remembers anything from being a military man that one Halloween.

Out of nowhere, a scream pierces the air and their group skids to a stop.

“Agent Finn, investigate—”

A blast, like a bomb going off nearby, interrupts all further speaking. The ground shakes, smoke rapidly pouring out from the vents. Buffy, ever the opportunist, is not about to let this go to waste.

Taking advantage of Riley’s not-so-tight straps, she slips her hands free and rips the shackles from her ankles, rolling off the gurney at the same time as she uses it as a weapon, tossing it at three of the commando guys. She doesn’t have time to see them fall to the floor. Her heart is pumping, adrenaline and Slayer power spreading through her veins and eating up the poison, fueling her movements as she races to free Spike. He flashes her a grin as he leaps up, sharp demonic teeth glinting, and she returns it.

The soldiers don’t stand a chance. The men and women in lab coats scatter, and with Spike’s help, the camouflaged frat boys are incapacitated quickly. Riley is one of the ones she’d knocked unconscious with the flying gurney, and she spares him a pitying glance before taking off after Spike.

Like she’s experienced thus far, all the hallways look the same as they run, and Buffy fears they're caught like hamsters in a spinning wheel, going in circles, but Spike’s gotten out of here once and he seems to know where he’s going so she keeps her mouth shut for the time being and follows. An alarm is blaring in the distance, getting louder and louder, and suddenly the smoke starts to get thicker, billowing and black as Buffy and Spike dive under a metal door that’s sliding shut and find themselves in a huge space full of control panels, the heart of the Initiative lab.

There’s fire here. And a _lot_ of soldiers. And, among the chaos, is that...?

“ _Buffy_!” Willow cries, and the sound of her friend’s voice almost brings Buffy to her knees.

But they’re not out of the woods yet. She has to focus.

A crowd of demons, a variety of different breeds, has escaped their cages and struggles against the numerous super-strong young soldiers trying to disable them. It’s madness, the fire roaring against one wall, machines sparking and sizzling, the massive fight taking up the large room. To her dismay, Buffy turns around and Spike’s gone. She sees him a little ways away, defending himself against some guys with taser guns. She can’t worry about it too much though, for she’s occupied by two soldiers, quickly dealt with, and then a trio of vampires that decide to take a break from feasting on their captors to snack on her. It’s a fatal decision. Buffy wipes the dust on her scrub pants.

Just as she’s convinced herself that they’d been a hallucination, a mirage in this wasteland, her friends rise up out of the smoke. Giles, Willow, Anya, Xander, and a blonde girl Buffy doesn’t know surround her all at once.

“We found you!” Willow reaches for her, eyes sparkling with tears, but Giles puts a hand on the witch’s shoulder.

“There’ll be time for hugs later. We must flee while we still can,” he states, and Buffy can’t believe he’s actually here, telling her what to do, and it’s the greatest thing _ever_.

“Okay, I just have to find…”

Her eyes land on Spike. Through the red-hot flames, she sees him throw a punch only to double back in pain. The chip’s working again: he’s unable to protect himself. Horror claws up her throat. In her dreams, he keeps burning—she is not going to let that happen, not again, not here.

Buffy dashes across the room. The heat from the fire makes her sweat, moisture gathering on her forehead and pooling in her lower back, and she can barely breathe from the heavy smoke settling over the room. Concern for him makes her stomach lurch as she loses sight of Spike in the confusion, spinning around as she tries to locate him, growing more and more desperate. She kills demons when she can, knocks soldiers unconscious, keeps her friends in her side-vision as she searches and searches and _searches_ —where is he? How _dare_ he do this to her, make her promise to not die, and then leave—

A gun goes off and Buffy’s slammed to the floor. Muck and grime and grit coat her cheek as she’s pressed to the filthy tiles, the weight of a body keeping her down, and she struggles, tears falling out of her eyes, yelling for—Spike. He’s above her, shielding her body. Her heart thuds— _thump, thump, thump_ —like a drum.

Holy shit. He’s just taken a bullet for her.

Before the lone shooter can fire again, a chunk of ceiling tumbles down and the gunman is taken out by the falling rubble. Spike sags against her, the ridges of his demonic brow against her forehead.

“Can we rest now, Buffy?”

She grips onto his shoulders, every inch of their bodies touching, so close that it feels like he’s melting into her—he hadn’t left, hadn’t abandoned her like every other man in her life, he’d kept their promise, kept their truce. It’s still them, _together_ , them against everything, against the whole world if that’s what it comes to. _You’ve ruined me._ She understands now.

“Spike, I—”

Several things happen all at once. Someone attempts to grab her vampire, who, injured and bleeding, roars like a fiend. His eyes flash yellow, flames reflected in those hellish depths as he snarls at Giles.

“—off her, you beast!”

“G-man, this place is about to collapse,” Xander’s saying nervously, glancing at the cracks in the ceiling.

Willow and her mousy blonde friend try to help Buffy up but she shakes them off.

“Giles! Let Spike _go_ , he’s been helping me. We have a truce.”

“Buffy—”

“There’s no _time_ ,” Xander yells, voice cracking, as the earth trembles.

They all move at once, as a unit. Xander and Anya make a beeline for the elevator, Giles right behind them, holding a crossbow, and Buffy drags a limping Spike as the witches cast a protection spell that bubbles around the group, keeping them safe from the growing fire and any other threats.

Packed into the elevator, Giles presses the button for them to go up at the same time as the power is cut. Everything goes dark, pitch-black except for the orange light flickering in from under the metal doors, casting everyone in an eerie nightmarish glow.

“Well,” Xander states the obvious. “ _That’s_ not good.”

Spike’s leaning on her side and Buffy shifts so she can put his arm over her shoulder, helping to support his weight. He buries his face in her neck and sighs. She holds him a little tighter.

Chanting fills the elevator car as Willow and the other girl work their magic, and soon they’re moving, going higher and higher, out of that fiery pit.

It feels like a dream. Emerging from underground, walking from the elevator through Lowell House, out into the crisp night air. There’s grass under her feet, stars twinkling in the sky, and Spike’s hand is entwined with hers. Buffy feels like she’s been underwater, half-asleep for so long—now the drugs have faded from her system, her head feels clear, she feels strong. She feels _free_.

 

***

 

She remembers fragments of the journey home: the smell of the autumn breeze, the comforting presence of the Scooby gang all around, the faint buzz of streetlamps, Spike pressed to her side. And then they’re at her house on Revello Drive, her mom’s opening the door, _sobbing_ , pulling her into a tight hug. Buffy has to pinch herself to make sure it's all real.

“We’re home,” she starts to say to Spike, but he’d slipped into the shadows and vanished into the kitchen while everyone else crowded into the living room.

After everything they’ve been through, being separated from him feels like losing a limb. Or an organ. Like a very specific organ still thundering in her chest…

“—think they followed us?” Xander is asking, darting a look at the door. Anya clings to his arm, both of their faces darkened by soot.

Willow is by the window, eyes closed, casting some sort of protection veil over the house.

“It’s certainly possible.” Giles is all action-man, rifling through the chest of weapons over by the couch.

Everyone seems caught between relief and tension, the high from their escape clashing with anxiety that the soldiers will soon pursue the fugitive hostiles. Besides residue from the smoke and a few lingering coughs, all of the Scoobies are unharmed, a miracle considering what had gone down. They’d come for her, saved her, as she’d saved them so many times. These brave humans with no sacred calling, no duty, had risked themselves for her. It’s such a beautiful thing, their loyalty, to a girl who bears the scars of abandonment.

As the others fortify the fort in case of further attack, in the doorway, Joyce releases her, strokes her hair, holds her face in two palms like she’d done when Buffy was a child.

Next to Willow, the blonde who Buffy’s never met—Tara, she’ll later learn—smiles timidly. Over Joyce’s shoulder, she smiles back.

“Buffy,” her mom says, and her attention refocuses. “Honey, you’re bleeding. Are you hurt? Can I—”

“I’m okay, I promise. These are only surface; Slayer healing remember? I just—I need to find Spike.” She doesn’t balk at the request like the gang would (Buffy’s gonna have to ponder her mom’s bizarre friendship with the vampire later, but right now it’s definitely of the good).

Glancing to Giles at the others, Joyce nods, squeezes her hands. “He went into the kitchen. Go.”

The overhead lights are off as she rounds the corner, and, _duh_ , he’s made to see in the dark, but she’s got these pesky human eyes, so Buffy flips the light switch. Spike jolts like a startled animal, backing up from where he’d been hunched over the sink. She remembers all at once that he’s been shot, and it makes her want to vomit, how close she’d come to being made into a block of Swiss cheese herself. Guns are _officially_ the worst.

“It’s just me,” she says. Her voice is strained, and Buffy realizes she’s on the brink of tears.

He’s shirtless, there’s blood smeared on the countertop, and _Jesus_ , there’s a knife in his hand; the whole room kind of looks like something from a slasher flick. But the only thing Spike’s slashing is _himself_ , she realizes with growing horror.

“Stop! God, what are you—”

“I have to get it out before it fuckin’ closes again,” he grunts, his demon face morphed into an expression of furious agony as he butchers the wound on his shoulder.

She rips takes the steak knife out of his hand. “Are you insane? You’re going to saw your arm off with this thing. Let me get some tweezers or, uh, something—”

“I can do it myself! I don’t need your _pity_ , go back to your merry band of mates and fuck right off,” Spike growls, shoving her away from him, brutal and desperate.

It catches her completely by surprise—she bounces off the island, hip hitting the edge of the counter, barely keeping herself from toppling onto the floor. Startled, unsure, Buffy sucks in a harsh breath. Tears blur her vision, his face swirling.

“Is this...are we back to this?” she chokes out.

What about the truce? But no—God, she’s so _stupid_ , the truce is over and they’re out, and that means they’re enemies, they _hate_ each other again, right, because that’s what they did before and that’s how it was always going to end, but she’d somehow let herself believe—believe what? Buffy couldn’t even let herself think it, not now.

How could she forget? Slayers don’t get happily ever after.

“ _Get out_ ,” she tells him, and oh, haven’t they done this dance before?

Just like last time, Spike leaves without a word.


	7. Chapter 7

Her dreams that night are jumbled, confused, half-formed things. Buffy’s caught somewhere underground, dark and damp, clawing her way out, dirt in her eyes, pulling herself out of a grave with her name on it. Then she martyrs herself, jumps from a tower, falling, falling, falling. She dances and sings for a demon, she spins and spins; Spike catches her. Suddenly she’s sixteen again and she’s telling Giles, eyes watery, voice soft, that she doesn’t want to die—but she does, _twice_ —and when she rises again, Buffy looks in the mirror. All her teeth have fallen out.

 

***

 

The next morning, Tara is making tea when Buffy comes into the kitchen. Everyone else is still asleep; it’s early, the sun still glowing pink and orange on the horizon.

Willow’s friend gives her a worried look as she enters. “S-sorry, did I w-wake you?”

Buffy yawns. “No, no. I had a nightmare. And then I was hungry, so…” she trails off, shrugging one shoulder.

All of the Scoobies had stayed over at her house last night at Giles’ request: Willow and Tara in the guest bedroom, Giles on the couch, and Xander and Anya sharing the inflatable mattress that her mom had pulled out of the closet. From the kitchen, the two girls can hear Xander’s snoring pick up in the living room and they giggle.

“I’m gonna make toast. Want a piece?” Buffy offers, making her way around the kitchen island. She glances at the back door longingly for a moment before catching herself, sighing in frustration as she flips open the bread box with more force than strictly necessary; it slams and she winces slightly.

“No, I…”

Buffy looks up from the loaf of bread. Tara’s looking at her thoughtfully, though not _at_ her exactly, more like the space around her.

Realizing what she’s doing, Tara shakes her head, cheeks coloring. “Sorry, I didn’t—I can see auras and I was w-wondering last night...yours and the vampire’s—”

Her fingers tighten on the bread, smooshing it a bit. “His name is Spike.”

“Right. Uh, are you—I mean, is there…” Tara trails off, like she isn’t sure how to word something. She tries again, “There’s something connecting the two of you. Like, magic. I can see it now, faintly, but when you were together it was thick and it _glowed,_ like a silvery rope attaching you.”

A bird chirps outside and the sound is much too cheerful for so early in the morning.

Buffy fidgets with the hem of her pajama shirt. Tara’s sweet smile puts her at ease, but this whole conversation is majorly wiggy. “What does that mean?”

“I d-don’t know. You’ve been having nightmares, strange dreams...about Spike?”

“Maybe.” Buffy lets go of the bread, realizing she’s crushed it beyond repair. _What a great metaphor_ , she grumbles in her head.

“Can you think of anything that m-might have bound you together? Something you could have accidentally said or done while a lot of power or, um, magic was happening?”

Buffy clutches the edge of the countertop, glancing at the doorway that leads to the rest of the house. All is quiet except for Xander’s snoring, but she lowers her voice anyway when she asks, “Like, marriage vows? While a spell was happening?”

Tara looks startled, tea cup pausing halfway to her mouth. “I’m not sure, but that certainly...well, I mean, words do have more power than you think, especially when—”

She can feel a headache coming on. This is too much, _too much_. “What does this even mean? Can you undo it? I don’t—”

And then it occurs to her. Buffy’s shoulders relax, the panic building in her chest subsiding. It all makes sense. “This is why I’ve been feeling all these weird things for him. _Of course!_ God, this makes everything so simple. Willow’s spell kept us connected, right, or something? Enough to make me think that I…that Spike...”

Tara sets her cup down and steps closer. “Buffy, I’m not sure—”

But Buffy’s already running up the stairs, yelling, “No, Tara, this is great! Thank you so much!”

 

***

 

She takes a shower. Buffy spends almost an hour under the hot spray, scrubbing her skin so that it’s pink and clean. A couple times, just to be certain, she peeks out from behind the curtain to make sure there are no hidden cameras in the bathroom even though logically she knows there won’t be any. But reason is no comfort to her, doesn’t ease the near-crippling fear that she’ll open her eyes and be back in that underground lab, trapped and caged.

For a split second, Buffy wishes that Spike was here. And it’s okay, right, to let herself want that when it’s not even really her that wants it? Tara had said all the weird stuff with Spike has to do with lingering magic from the spell. No big, nothing wrong with _her_. What a relief. No more tragic vampire romances for this girl, no sir. It’s all a product of the spell, or what they’d done during the spell, or...whatever. Doesn’t matter, as long as it isn’t real.

It feels real though, the way she misses him. Ugh. His stupid cheekbones and his stupid smile and his stupid fingers, running up her back and gripping her hip and teasing her nipples—

Buffy’s breath catches. The warm water slides over her chest and she reaches up, flicks her thumb against the little peaks. Spike’s hand are bigger, colder, and she tries to imagine it, his pale hand fondling her like he’d done so long ago now. His fingers have calluses on them, the scrape of it against her sensitive flesh had been heavenly. Why would he have calluses? From fighting, maybe, but not likely, not on his fingers like that. From writing? Does he still write poetry?

It feels odd, to know things about him that he’d never shared. To know things as a result of...their bond, or whatever it is. Does he know things about her? Has he seen things from her past, or from the future, as she has?

Can he see her right now?

She stills, heart thundering. It’s not possible, she knows that. Buffy hasn’t seen snippets of his life in real time so why would he be able to peer into her life now? It doesn’t make sense. Still...just the thought makes her shiver, makes her ache, makes her wet.

Her hand drifts down her stomach. She leans back against the cool shower tiles and imagines it’s Spike there behind her, his hand between her legs, his breath in her ear instead of just steam.

Buffy brings herself off like that, her orgasm coming quicker than it ever has when she’s been solo. It leaves her a little dazed, sliding to sit down by the drain. She tips her head up, lets the water fall over her, and stays there until the spray gets cold.

A few minutes later, she stands in front of the mirror brushing her hair. She can hear everyone downstairs now, awake and seeking breakfast in the kitchen, but she takes her time getting the tangles and knots out. Before going to bed last night, the whole gang had hunkered down in the living room and tried to figure out what to do next— _“debriefing”_ Giles had called it in his best Serious Voice—and Buffy knew that was important given that fact that Walsh might come after her, but with everyone crowded in, _watching_ her, it had put Buffy on edge. They were concerned, she knows that, it was just...a lot.

In the time before Joyce had cut off the discussion and ushered everyone to bed, no one had mentioned Spike, and she suspects Xander and maybe even Willow had forgotten his involvement in the ordeal, but Giles...he kept throwing her looks, meaningful, inquiring looks like he was trying to think up what to say, how to approach the subject of the vampire. She hopes he hadn’t heard what had gone down between Spike and her in the kitchen before she’d made him leave. She’s been trying so hard all morning to put it out of her mind, the way she’d felt watching him walk away.

“Not real,” Buffy mumbles to herself. “I don’t care about him. Like, at all.”

She doesn’t care that he was injured. Besides, she knows for a fact that being shot can’t kill a vampire...but do they bleed out? She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care that he’s out there all alone and Walsh might be hunting them both down at this very minute, might have him cornered, might have _dusted_ him…

Distressed, Buffy throws her hairbrush into the cabinet hard enough to rattle the other products as she retrieves her toothbrush and squirts a dollop of paste on the bristles.

There’s no use worrying about Spike. There’s no use worrying about him because he _definitely_ isn’t worried about her, he’s probably crossing the border out of California by now. He’s probably given up on America altogether, is hitching a ride back to England or something, and being very dramatic about it too. Idiot.

A jolt of pain snaps her out of her thoughts. “Ouch!”

Buffy pulls her toothbrush out of her mouth, spitting a glob of blood into the sink. There’s an ache on the left side of her mouth, in the back where she’d been roughly brushing her teeth. What the heck? Does she have a cavity? From only two weeks of not brushing? That seems majorly unfair. Can the PTB seriously not give a girl a break?

Rinsing her mouth out, Buffy makes a mental note to call a dentist (or, um, make her mom call one) after everything has settled down. With one last look in the mirror, she exits the bathroom.

Having slept the night in her mom’s bedroom, she hasn’t been in her room since...since she had sex with Spike under the spell. Buffy swallows. The tidal-wave of memory threatens to pull her under, but she perseveres, content with the knowledge that it’s all fake anyway. She dresses slowly, grey sweats and a plain oversized t-shirt. She puts her wet hair in a bun. On the way downstairs, before she can stop herself, she opens her underwear drawer, pulls out a gleaming bit of silver.

Maybe Tara will want to see it? Maybe it’ll help to undo this mess or something? Biting her lip, assuring herself that she’s just bringing it downstairs to Tara, Buffy slips the band onto her ring finger.

 

***

  


Maggie Walsh adjusts the bulky headphones over her ears, straining to hear the audiotape being played for her. There’s crackling, immense static, overlayed on top of the voices and making it unable to properly decipher the conversations.

“We can’t make anything out, they’re blocking our devices somehow,” Finn explains, shuffling closer to present the other low-quality recordings. There’s not much room in the surveillance van, yet his debriefing is as professional as ever—one of many admirable traits Maggie appreciates about her favorite student.

“And Hostile 17?”

“Vacated the premises already, ma’am. Given our current setbacks in staff and tech, we’re having trouble tracking it. But we’ll find it. Soon.”

She nods. “And the girl?”

Finn clears his throat. He has some sort of attached to her, the professor has noticed. “She’s still inside her mother’s house, ma’am.”

“Good. Alert me if she leaves.”

“Of course. And if Hostile 17 comes back, are we to capture it?”

Maggie’s hand tightens on her headphones, anger coursing through her veins at the memory of her burning lab, the lives lost and, more importantly, her destroyed research. She’s been instructed by her superiors to shut things down and head back to the military base outside Sunnydale, but she isn’t about to go back empty-handed. She _will_ have something to show for all this, for her insistence that demons could be useful in improving American warfare, and that thing, Maggie’s decided, is Buffy Summers. The Vampire Slayer. After reviewing snippets of audio, she knows that’s what Hostile 17 had called the girl, what they’d been trying to hide with that phony story. Her pride is injured at being tricked, but it would all be worth it once she has possession of the mythic super-soldier.

The vampire, however, she has no further use for. The behavior-modification chip had been a success, Maggie had tested it and seen the results, and now Hostile 17 is irrelevant.

“If it returns, kill it.”


	8. Chapter 8

When Buffy comes out of her bedroom, she’s so distracted that she almost bumps straight into Tara. Willow’s new friend is already so skittish, stammering and hardly able to look anyone in the eye, and Buffy’s afraid she’s scared her. But despite being startled, Tara smiles gently, tucking a stray strand of ashy blonde hair behind one ear.

“Hi, Buffy. The bathroom...is it…?”

She jabs her thumb over her shoulder toward the bathroom at the end of the hall. “That door. Sorry if it’s all steamy. Just showered.”

Tara nods. “I bet it was nice. B-being able to, I mean. Was there—did they let you...shower? Down there?”

The memory of how Spike had helped her shower replays in Buffy’s mind. 

_“Do you think they would let me drown myself in here?”_

_“I wouldn’t let you.”_

His voice, an imaginary whisper in her ear, sends a shiver down her spine. Had he really sounded so intense, so sincere? Or is she remembering wrong, things twisting and distorting to become something totally different. Surely Spike would never care that much about whether she lives or dies.

At Buffy’s hesitation, unaware of her internal conflict about a certain vampire, Tara hurries to say, “S-sorry, I’m sure you don’t w-wanna talk about it.”

Buffy shakes her head to clear it, mentally shutting down any train of thought that might circle back to Spike. She hadn’t answered any questions that Giles bombarded her with last night, and she’s sure that the whole gang, not just Tara, is curious about what exactly went down while she was held in the lab. 

“No, no, you’re—it’s fine,” she tells the witch. “You’re easy to talk to at least. I’m not looking forward to Giles starting in with the interrogations again, though. 

Tara plays with her long, flowy skirt for a moment. Her voice is earnest and quiet when she says, “He only wants to keep you safe. Everyone was a wreck while you were gone. I don’t think Mr. Giles slept at all in those two weeks.”

Guilt chokes Buffy, swift and sudden. She’s never really thought about how hard it must have been for them—her vanishing from campus without a trace, almost like those kids Sunday had killed at the beginning of the semester. She thinks about Willow, waiting and waiting for her to come back from patrol, calling Xander when she wakes up and the other bed is still empty. She thinks about her mother, still not completely used to the fact that her daughter is a Slayer, not knowing what happened to her, if her only child was even still alive. She thinks about Giles, her Watcher, her only father-figure, who has had her back and supported her through everything all these years. None of them had given up on her. They’d found her somehow, gotten her out. The least Buffy can do is answer some questions.

She stares at the floor, feeling selfish and small.

In the following silence, Tara touches her arm in genuine sympathy before moving past Buffy to the bathroom. 

“Um, before you...about earlier…”

Hand on the doorknob, Tara pauses, then nods. “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me too. About you and Spike. But I think you should soon. They’ll understand. They love you.”

Buffy swallows, unprepared for the way her heart spasms in her chest. The walls of the hallway suddenly seem to be closing in. “There is no ‘me and Spike’. That’s...just no. And what you said this morning confirmed it! Any gooey-type feelings I may or may not have for him is just a trick, an illusion, left from this spell a couple of weeks ago—we were getting married, it was a whole thing—and so, yeah. Yeah. That’s that.”

“Getting married? Oh! The Will Be Done spell, Willow told me about it.”

Huh. Wills and this girl must be really good friends. Buffy vaguely remembers her roommate mentioning Tara from Wicca club, but nothing compared to how close they are now. A different kind of sorrow fills her. Buffy doesn’t feel jealous that her best friend is making connections beyond the Scooby gang, but she does feel left out. She’s now, more than ever, painfully aware that she’s missed a lot. All the while she and Spike had been in their bubble underground, real life had kept going on above. Weird. 

Biting her lip, Buffy replies, “That’s the one.”

“And you were...in love? I wasn’t aware of that part.”

Yeah, the Scoobies, especially Willow as the culprit and cause of the whole ordeal, probably didn’t want to linger on that aspect of the spell. Buffy remembers Willow profusely apologizing afterward, Xander’s gagging at all the making out she did with Spike, and Giles’ exasperated sighs as he fumbled around blind. Not that they even knew the full extent of what actually happened, but still. Better to gloss over such things.

Buffy shifts, fidgeting. “Well, yeah. We were getting married. Hence the lovey-dovey.”

“Riiiiight,” Tara responds slowly. “But Willow didn’t say for you to be in love. She only said for you two to get married. Lots of unhappy people get married.”

Buffy knows all about unhappy people and loveless marriages. As much as she tries to forget about the vicious verbal fights Joyce and Hank had engaged in during the last months in LA, those nightmarish memories have stuck with her. She remembers him leaving, packing his suitcase and walking out the door just like so many times before, so many business trips and vacations, but this time sixteen-year-old Buffy knew that he was never coming back, at least not like before. He was in love, or at least lust, with someone else—his secretary, of all the freaking clichés.

But it always starts out good, right? Her parents had loved each other at the start, she knows that. Maybe it’s not like that for everyone, though. Buffy considers this for the first time. People settling for someone, people arranged into a union, people who care for each other but are too broken to fully love. But she and Spike had been. In love, that is. Very much so. And Tara’s right. Nowhere had that been a part of what Willow had unintentionally wished. Given Buffy’s history, and what she knew of Spike’s, it would have made more sense for them to be stuck together in a loveless marriage somehow, bound by obligation or duty or something. But they’d been happy. So happy.

“What are you saying, Tara?”

Her voice wobbles. “I’m just saying, I’m n-not sure—”

“Well, _I’m_ sure that Spike equals icky.” They’re childish and frustrated, the words that come out of her mouth, but Buffy feels like everything she’s ever believed in might be shifting and it’s just...she can’t deal with it right now. She isn’t certain of what Tara’s trying to convey with her careful explanation and kind eyes, but Buffy doesn’t like it. Not one bit.

Still by the bathroom door, Tara eyes her the way her mom does when she starts to have a temper tantrum. “He didn’t seem icky last night.”

Buffy lifts her chin, crossing her arms over her chest defiantly. “I know him better than you.”

“I’m sure you do.”

Buffy stills. Tara gives her an apologetic look, wringing her hands. Over the roaring in her ears, she registers a faint shouting. Giles, he’s call her name, asking her to come downstairs. Has he heard them talking? God, Buffy just wants to go back to sleep and never, ever wake up again.

Going into the bathroom, Tara closes the door with a soft click, leaving her alone in the dim hallway. Buffy takes a deep breath, heading to the staircase. Putting one socked in front of the other—left, right, left, right, like a robot—she descends, rounding the corner into the living room.

“Honey, are you hungry?” her mom wants to know, voice raised to carry from the kitchen to the other side of the house.

Sitting beside Willow on the couch, Buffy mutely shakes her head, then, realizing Joyce can’t see her, calls out her refusal. Whatever appetite she’d had is totally gone. Wills grabs her hand, squeezing it once, and Buffy finally has the courage to look up from the floorboards. Giles stares at her from the armchair. Anya and Xander are elsewhere, either in the kitchen with her mom or back at his place. Whatever the conversation Willow and Giles had been having had halted the second they heard her on the stairs, but Buffy feels it linger in the air. She knows they were talking about her.

She sighs. “Do you think it’s possible that they won’t come after me and everything will just go back to normal?”

Giles lets out a deep sigh of his own. There are deep, dark circles under his eyes. “I sincerely doubt it. Willow has had to put up several anti-surveillance charms to hinder their ability to listen to us. They know where we are, where _you_ are, but haven’t acted yet. They’re most likely waiting for you to leave.”

“Listen to us? Are they—?”

“They’re nearby, yes, according to Willow.”

She swallows. “Are we safe here? Is my mom?”

“That is what I need to discuss with you. The Initiative has us outnumber in bodies and equipment; the only reason we were able to rescue you in the ambush yesterday was by surprise and luck.”

“Riley let something slip to me after class one day, and that’s how we figured out where you were. I’d done a locating spell, but it only showed us that you were still somewhere on campus. We didn’t even think about the possibility of being underground. So I asked Riley a bunch of question to see if he’d seen you around, and when he got kind of flustered, I decided to hack his computer on a hunch. From there, I weaseled my way into all the shady government stuff. Pretty bad cybersecurity, considering it’s the military and all.”

“Right,” Giles continues. “But now that they know about us, we stand in a poor position to beat them. Especially as we suspect they have us practically surrounded. We need to leave for a time, get you out of here before they close in, before they endanger your mother, and lay low as we figure out what to do next.”

“Can we even beat them? I don’t—they’re human, Giles. We can’t kill them,” Buffy says. 

This isn’t the first time they’ve faced non-demon adversaries, but this feels different. Bigger. A lot bigger.

Willow sits up, bouncing on the couch a little. Her neon green t-shirt kind of hurts Buffy’s eyes. 

“We could call a coven of witches from Norway that I’ve been talking to! They seem really friendly, only use light magic, and they worship this super cool earth spirit named—off-topic, sorry. But with their help, we could perform a spell large enough to ensnare the minds of the soldiers and scientists, erase their memory or something so they don’t even remember Buffy!”

And what of the data Walsh collected, probably uploaded somewhere safe? Even if these guys in Sunnydale get taken care of, will more military show up and try to snatch her? Buffy knows she can’t fight the entire U.S. army by herself. Is this a lost cause? Should she just head over to Professor Walsh’s office hours and let them have her to save all the trouble for her friends?

Buffy can tell Giles is thinking of similar holes in Willow’s plan, but he has a different point to make, so he merely says, “Yes, perhaps, Willow. We certainly need to come up with a plan, but for now,” he looks at his Slayer, “we need to vacate the house as quickly as possible.”

As much as she never wants to leave her house, like, ever again—not even to get ice cream—it makes sense. She doesn’t want her mom to get hurt, or anyone else. They’re sitting ducks here. That’s a weird phrase, right? Sitting ducks. Buffy mulls it over. Why wouldn’t the ducks just fly away? 

Circling back to the topic at hand, she asks, “Where are we going?”

Giles clears his throat, not really looking at her. “I...well, of course, I rang Angel again, but he’s still unavailable, and we need to act immediately. The element of surprise needs to be in favor, yes? One of my old friends from the British Museum has a cabin—”

She sucks in a breath. “Again?”

“Pardon?”

“You said you called him _again_.”

Willow lets go of Buffy’s hand, sitting up straighter. She gives Giles a look, half-pity, half-sadness, that clearly says: “Not now” or “Don’t tell her”. It makes Buffy feel vaguely nauseous. She hasn’t thought about Angel in ages. This reminder of him sits like a stone on her chest, heavy and suffocating. 

“Yes,” Giles goes on to say, “I contacted him when you went missing. I wasn’t sure...anyway, you weren’t there, and he was busy with something in LA and wasn’t able to come to Sunnydale.”

“Why can’t he come now, to help us?”

“I’m not quite sure. I tried to explain the situation to him, Buffy, but...he merely said he was busy,” Giles finishes lamely, and it seems to echo around the room.

Busy. Angel was too busy to come look for her, to help the others track her down. He’s too busy to come and hide with her, keep her safe. He’s too busy for the supposed love of his life? They’re broken up obviously, but she’d thought...if she ever _really_ needed him...

Anger swells in her chest, something old and brittle cutting into her heart.

Feeling very far away from herself, Buffy bobs her head once in understanding. She feels like she’s playing a part in a play. Playing some girl, some girl who isn’t her, filled with so much rage and heartache that she’s barely human. Buffy stands because that’s what her character wants to do. She’s only following the script.

“I’m tired,” she announces. Her voice is cold, hard, and nothing like Buffy Summer’s voice. No, this isn’t her, she’s just playing a part. This is some other girl who feels hollow, some other girl who is finding out her first love is really over, it _has_ to be some other girl, Oh God...

“I was as frustrated as you when—”

“I doubt it,” Buffy cuts off her Watcher. 

She turns. She has to get out of here, away of Giles’ sympathy and Willow’s pitying eyes, and just all of it. It takes a lot to go back up the stairs, her muscles sluggish and slow like she’s moving through deep, murky water. Let Giles and Willow figure out what to do next. They’re the smart ones anyway, right? Buffy's just the muscle, the weapon. Point her at something and she’ll kill it. Wow, how wiggy is that. It sounds so horrible when she thinks about it that way.

Maybe Walsh has the right idea after all. Maybe she’s better off in a cage somewhere. All she does here is put her mom and friends in danger, and if Angel doesn’t even see something in her worth fighting for…maybe there isn’t. She’s caused all these people so much pain over the years. Tara’s words— _“Everyone was a wreck while you were gone.”_ There’s a reason Slayers don’t have a family, don’t get close with their Watcher or with anyone. Maybe she’s better off alone. Clearly, Angel knows this already, has figured it out and has been trying to tell her. Why hasn’t Buffy realized? She feels so stupid. So, so stupid.

Tears slip down her cheeks, hot and silent, as she softly closes her bedroom door. Something ugly and broken bursts out of her, and then she’s crying, sobbing, sinking down to the carpeted floor because she can’t find it in her to make it to the bed. Her blinds are down, keeping most of the sunlight out, only letting in lines of flickering brightness to break up the black interior. Rolling toward the wall, Buffy curls up in the darkness, hugging her knees to her chest, frame shaking violently. Everyone downstairs is distant, cut off from her. She feels like the only person in the whole world.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Discussion of implied depression and PTSD. It's brief and not too intense, but I'm just gonna put a trigger warning here just in case.

The sun sets.

Riley lifts the night binoculars to his eyes. From his low hiding spot in the neighboring bushes, he watches as a slim shadow appears in an upstairs window of the Summers’ residence. Buffy, hair pulled up into a bun, clad in jeans and an oversized sweatshirt, appears on the roof. With practiced maneuvers, she shimmies down the tree outside her bedroom. With a graceful jump from one of the lower branches, she lands easily in the grass and begins to make her way across the lawn. Even from his crouched stake-out position, Riley can see the piece of sharpened wood in her right hand. A stake.

So. Buffy really _is_ the Vampire Slayer. It’s true, all the stories Riley had thought were only myths. And the girl he’d had a crush on in Psych 101 is that girl, the one that captured demons had whispered about—the chosen one.  

Of course, Riley believed his mentor when Maggie explained it to the remaining men after the lab was ambushed and evacuated. There’s not much of it remaining; the fire and explosions had continued to rage despite the lack of visible source, and with the flow of angry monsters being released, Riley’s squad of soldiers had been instructed to flee. Now, they’re working out of a few Initiative vehicles, and that’s where Maggie had gathered the surviving men, quite literally rallied the troops, and put down their next course of action.

Their primary objective is to apprehend Buffy Summers with minimal civilian interference. Because Maggie now knows what she really is, and how Buffy can help the military’s goal of demon surveillance and detainment. Who knows demons better than her, the Vampire Slayer, the one handpicked by some higher force to fight off all the nasty things that go bump in the night?

All of it doesn’t exactly sit well with Riley. For one thing, he’s still having a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that the quirky, sweet girl he’d admired in psych lectures is far from the girl he’d originally imagined her to be. Riley’d seen some of the video feed of Buffy cuddling with Hostile 17—it made bile burn his throat and his vision momentarily turn red. Now, at least he knows that Buffy isn’t turning into a monstrous fiend, but somehow her being the Slayer is almost…worse. Because he can’t blame Hostile 17 for that, and Riley can’t find some way to undo it, save her, turn her back into the normal girl he wishes she was. Because she’s never been normal. She’s been the Vampire Slayer for years and years according to Maggie. And it’s always been in her, the power, dormant and waiting to be unleashed.

Mind whirling, Riley observes as Buffy crosses the street with her arms wrapped around her middle.

Since knowing who Buffy truly is, Maggie is more interested in the girl than ever. Riley doesn’t know the details of what exactly that means, but it isn’t his job to know. It’s his job to take orders and complete them. So he does.

Carefully extracting himself from the overgrown bushes of Buffy’s elderly neighbor, Riley follows her down the dark sidewalk. He waves at the black van farther down the street. The headlights turn on and the engine starts.

***

 “We have eyes on Hostile 17.”

 “Good. Eliminate it.”

“10-4.”

***

It’s surprisingly easy, losing the van that had been following her. Buffy cuts across someone’s yard, mindful of the hanging laundry and the angry Chihuahua yapping at her heels, and sticks to the shadows as she makes her way to the closest cemetery. Of the twelve in Sunnydale, this is the smallest. It holds mostly older graves and with no space for new residents, fledge vamps don’t come springing up here. There aren’t any crypts either for other demons to hang out in, so it’s pretty quiet. Ergo, Buffy doesn’t linger here much on patrol. But it’s kinda nice, much more peaceful than Restfield.

Buffy passes under the rickety iron archway. The patches of grass under her sneakers are brown and scraggily, and in the dark, the trees look like leafless skeleton creatures. The tight rows of headstones jutting out of the dirt look ancient and crumbling. As she walks, the breeze plays with the loose strands of hair falling out of her bun and caresses her cheeks—the night welcomes her. Buffy realizes that she’s missed this, patrolling. How strange that a girl can feel so at home with the dead.

She’s searching for one particular dead person, of course. It’s a bad idea—Buffy _knows_ it’s a bad idea—but that black van, with Walsh probably inside, has already caught sight of her anyway, so Buffy figures she might as well finish what she came out here to do before heading home. The thought should scare her, that her psycho professor is maybe right behind her at this very minute with a van of super-strong soldiers, but she can’t bring herself to care right now. She had been so gutted earlier, so deep in the throes of crying her eyes out that she’d feared all the moisture would leave her body and her mom would find her the next morning, only a dried-up husk of her former self. But Buffy isn’t upset now, though. She feels oddly numb.

  So, no. She isn’t going to go home yet. She’ll be Stealth Gal and do the avoidy thing, and she’ll do what she set out to do—find Spike. Back at home, with her eyes puffy and throat scratchy from crying, this had seemed like the most logical plan in the world. It seemed so reasonable, the need to track down Spike and let him know that Giles wants to drag her off to some cabin in the middle of the forest for a while. It’s just…he might notice if she goes all MIA. Spike might think she’s been captured. He might worry.

If he’s still in Sunnydale at all, that is. Which he’s likely not. Heck, if Buffy was him, she’d have skipped town as soon as possible after leaving her kitchen that night. And even if he’s still around, which he probably isn’t, he might not even care whether she gets taken by the Initiative or not. After all, why _would_ Spike care?

Buffy stops walking.

Why would Spike care? Because of the feelings left over from Willow’s spell. She doesn’t know why this hasn’t fully occurred to her earlier, but Buffy realizes that all the weird affection she has toward Spike…he must be feeling exactly the same way toward her, right, because the Will Be Done ordeal affected them both? Has he been thinking about her, dreaming about her, the way she has for him? It makes sense, now that she’s really thinking about it. The shadow buddy stuff, him following her around on campus before they’d been kidnapped, the snippets of fondness he’d showed her while in that horrible white cell.

The thing is…she hadn’t noticed anything very much off about all that because Spike is sorta like that normally. When he’s in town, he usually isn’t so obvious about tailing or watching her, but she knows he’d been observing her in The Bronze the night they’d met, and she knows he’d had minions videotape her patrolling that first year he and Drusilla had been in Sunnydale. As for the rest, and no matter how Buffy loathes to admit this, she knows Spike is capable of genuine human emotion. Giles has always told her that vampires aren’t able to feel in that way, but Buffy’s seen how Spike is around Dru, how in love he is, and even Angelus, the envy and anger. Those aren’t manufactured, and they aren’t soley in the service of feeding and fighting.

Buffy sighs. She’s even more confused now. All at once, she wants to cry again. Except the hurt and weep-urge is faraway—she’s still numb, her swirling emotions there and real but on the other side of a thick wall.

 “Ugh.”

Using her sleeve to wipe at her nose, Buffy lets out a frustrated groan and plops down to sit on one of the nearby headstones. Mr. Jones won’t mind, right? He’s been dead for decades and she’s totally going through something here, so, like, priorities.

Buffy sighs again, and she imagines she can hear the breath rattle around her empty ribcage. It feels like there’s a void in her chest, an endless black pit. This happens sometimes, the outbursts of sobbing and then the paralyzing nothing. Ever since her death at the Master’s hands, Buffy has had brief episodes of…whatever this is. She’s sure there’s a name for it in her psych textbook, but she’s scared to look. Especially after what happened with the clinic in LA, how her mom and dad had locked her up without a second thought. Buffy knows her mom and friends will find out about this eventually though. The older she gets, the more time goes on, the worse she is at hiding it. Hiding the darkness.

It’ll thaw in a little while, Buffy tells herself. It’s not like she’s gonna die and get revived again. That might allow the darkness to consume. But here and now, it’s only grabbed her by the ankle, and she’s become practiced in shaking it off.

Perking up at the sound of leaves crunching in the distance, Buffy squints and scans the trees. Probably just a squirrel; a vampire wouldn’t make so much noise. Nor would a trained soldier. Although, that does look a lot like Riley…

Behind her almost-kinda-ex-boyfriend, several other men in camo appear through the trees. For some reason, they don’t charge at her right away. Well. She isn’t about to wait for their feet to catch up to their brains.

Buffy stands up, and mock salutes them. “It’s been nice boys, but I really gotta dash.”

She runs, melting back into the shadows.

***

Buffy ditches them for a second time, and they seem to let her. One moment they’re chasing her, and the next they’re gone. And then, after she’s cruised a few cemeteries and staked some stray newbie vamps, they appear again out of nowhere. She figures that maybe they’re waiting for her at places they know she’ll go, so Buffy avoids the remaining cemeteries and heads downtown. She’s wandering the empty sidewalk of Main Street when the black van skids to a stop a few feet in front of her. But it just stays there by the curb as Buffy darts into an alley and disappears.

Unease begins to tie her stomach into knots. This isn’t like how the Initiative had banned her the first time. They’d been all with the dramatic music and intense chasing through the woods. Now, they seem content to wait her out—maybe they’re waiting for her to get tired, lost? But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would they do that…unless they were pretty confident they would always know where to find her.

Buffy ducks into one of the shops on the next street.

She tells herself that she’s just being paranoid. Maybe she hasn’t been losing them at all as she’d thought. Maybe they’ve been following her the whole time and she hasn’t noticed. Possible, but her spidey-sense are tingling. Something isn’t right here.

The shop Buffy breaks into is a clothing boutique. It’s a little too small-town for her style, but it’ll have to do. She grabs a tank top, a pair of shorts, and some blue running shoes before going over to the changing rooms. In the dark, she strips and puts the stolen clothes on. Buffy suspects that there’s some kind of tracking device in her clothes from home, so a new outfit should fix her current problem.

Joyce loves spy movies, the ones where the guy always wears a fancy suit and his hair stays perfect even after a fight scene, and Buffy remembers one she’d watched with her mom where the debonair spy had hidden stuff in the heel of his shoe. With her new blue sneakers on, Buffy inspects her own white ones, running her fingertip over the rubbery sole. It seems unmarred from any invasion. She checks over the inside, then the sweatshirt and jean she’d had on. Nothing seems amiss. Maybe sewn in? She feels along the seams and finds no abnormal bumps of any kind.

Buffy knows she’s been here too long, so she decides to just ditch her old clothes in the dressing room. In the dimness, she hides behind one of the racks and peeks over to the large windows at the front of the store. When the coast seems clear, she heads for the entrance. She’d broken the lock to get in, so she gingerly closes the door. Making a note to come back and pay for the things she took, and also hoping the shop doesn’t have any security cameras, Buffy crosses the street.

And then stops, gazing down at the manhole cover.

“Bet they can’t find me down there,” Buffy mutters, kneeling to lift the slab of metal.

Taking one last gulp of clean, fresh air, she jumps down into the sewers. The splash echoes along the dark tunnel. The murky water is only a few inches deep, not even reaching above her sneakers, but it’s far too close to her skin for Buffy’s comfort. The slimy walls and pungent aroma are so beyond _yuck_ that she doesn’t even have a word for it. She’s gonna need at least ten hot showers after this, for sure. Maybe twenty.

The smell is burning her nose, so she holds it as she climbs up the slippery ladder on the wall, leaning to heave the cover back over the manhole. It plunges her in total, utter darkness. She can’t even see her hand in front of her face. Slowly, she makes her way back down the ladder.

Her hands are grimy from touching the manhole cover, so she wipes them on her shorts, then places them on her hips. Okay. She’s in a gross sewer in the pitch-blackness. At least she’s ditched Walsh once and for all. Now, all Buffy has to do is find her way home. There’s a manhole on her street, so there must be a way, right? Demons and vamps use the sewers to get around, and if they can do it, then so can she.

Wait. Vamps…she totally spaced and left her stake back at the clothing shop. Crap. Giles is so gonna give her a lecture about this. If she can find her way to him, that is.

With her lack of eyesight, Buffy focuses on her other sense, listening for errant noises. There’s the _drip-drip-drip_ of water from a loose pipe, the sloshing of her shoes through the muck, her strangled breathing as she holds her shirt up to her nose. When the faint roar of a vehicle passes overhead, she freezes. Fear, real ice-cold fear, clenches around her heart for a couple of seconds until the car has sped away. The darkness has thawed, her feelings are coming back in small doses.

Feeling a surge of determination, Buffy lifts her chin and continues walking.

What the heck had she been thinking earlier, considering giving herself over to Walsh? She’d died, sure, but it had been at the hands of the Aurelian Master and it had been a prophecy—she’d saved the world, stopped an apocalypse. These guys—Walsh and her frat boy goons, even if she is backed by the force of the military—are just human. Way too strong, maybe. Creepy and evil, also maybe. But not more evil or strong than the Master had been, and Buffy’d stopped him at sixteen. She’ll find a way to put an end to Walsh’s wacky science stuff. She knows she will. Hope—it hasn’t been ripped from her yet.

The back of her neck tingles, goosebumps spreading over the exposed flesh over her upper back and arms. She wishes she still had her sweatshirt instead of this thin tank top, but no—those aren’t just cold tinglies. Buffy shivers. Vampires. A lot of ‘em, and heading her way.

Can’t a girl catch a break?

 There’s no way for her to be quiet, so she gives up on that and races down the tunnel, loud splashing probably drawing the attention of every fangy creature in the tri-state area. Buffy almost crashes into the wall when the sewer splits into two tunnels and heads in different directions. She takes a deep breath, trying to think. Which way? It sounds like a bad word problem: If a cranky Slayer who’s trying to get home is being followed by a crazy scientist and is at risk of being spotted by a group of vampires, should she go right or left?

Buffy’s about to go left when she feels something, an awareness prickling across her skin. She follows the familiar feeling and takes the right tunnel.

The ground is dryer in this part of the sewer—she can run quicker and quieter. And she does, hair flying behind her, arms swinging at her sides, eyes narrowed to pick out the shadows and shapes in the dark. She still can’t see much of anything, but her vision is better than when she first jumped down here. More than good enough to see a distant speck of fire. No, not fire. The simmering end of a cigarette.

She stops a few feet away from him. He’s holding it between his fingers away from his head, the lit cig, and Buffy can’t see his face. But she knows it’s him.

“Spike.”

She isn’t sure what exactly what she expects him to do, but standing there, leaning against the wall and saying nothing isn’t it. Ouch. She swallows around the dryness in her mouth. He’s not happy to see her, she could have guessed that by their last encounter, but she thought…

“Spike,” she says again, a little softer.

He sucks in a sharp breath through his nose. A loud splash echoes through the sewers.

"No now, Slayer. We’ve got company.”

“Vamps?

His voice is hard. “No. Captain America and the troops.”

“What? That can’t—“

 “I know what I smell.”

How he can smell anything past the persistent stank of urine and garbage is beyond her, but she isn’t going to argue.

“Were they chasing you down here?”

“Nah. Cornered me in a crypt in Restfield. Got away, snuck down ‘ere. Been loungin’ about for a few hours without any trouble. Course, that was ‘til you showed up. They followed you.”

“No, they couldn’t have. I was super careful. I did a costume change and everything.”

“Yeah? Well, I like the new digs. Did ya know your tip says ‘Orgasm Donor’ on it? Because I’d be very interested in—“

 “What?!” she screeches. “I can’t believe—it was dark in the store, okay? I thought I picked the one with the rainbow, oh my God—“

Spike laughs, low and deep, and her stomach flutters at the pleasant sound. She feels the whisper and creak of shifting leather right in front of her—when did he get so close? Curious, Buffy reaches out her hand and her arm doesn’t even extend all the way before her palm is pressed against the hard plane of his chest.

 “Spike, I—“

His voice is by her ear. “Later, baby. We gotta go, remember?”

Oh, right. Soldiers closing in, mortal danger, blah, blah, blah. Business as usual.

“Okay,” she tells him. “Where?”

“Up,” Spike says, and a moment later, he flicks his cigarette to the ground and she hears him climb one of those rusty ladders attached to the wall.

 He lifts the manhole cover and light floods the tunnel. Blinking rapidly, Buffy keeps her eyes lowered as she crawls up and out of the sewers and…onto her street? That’s definitely her house over there. Even with the minimal light from the moon and street lamps, it seems like day compared to the blackness of the underground tunnels, and anyway, she would recognize her house anyway. This is Revello Drive. Spike had been waiting by her house.

Buffy sends a searching look in his direction.

 “ _Later_ ,” Spike reiterates with a growl, and then lets out a string of curse words when he sees a black van—no, wait, there’s _three_ now—coming down the street.

Crap. What do they do? Go inside and risk the lives of her friends and family? Continue to play cat and mouse all over town? Buy a plane ticket to Tijuana? Buffy doesn’t know. She’s a metaphorical deer frozen in the literal headlights.

Spike grabs her wrist. It seems like he’s about to pull her back down into the sewers, but suddenly another engine interrupts the quiet neighborhood, and Joyce’s Jeep peels out of Buffy’s driveway. At the same time, a group of soldiers burst through the bushes on the other side of the street with their weapons held at the ready.

“Get in!” Giles yells from the driver’s seat.

Giles is blocking the street, but the trio of black vans only pick up speed, appearing to have the intent to smash right into the Jeep. Buffy and Spike exchange a look, then scramble into the back of her mom’s car just as the squad on foot surrounds them. They’re so close that one of the soldiers actually bangs into the car door as Buffy shuts it. He raises his gun, but Giles slams his foot on the gas and the Jeep shoots forward.

With a neck-breaking turn that sends Buffy sliding across the backseat, the car carries them away, weaving through the crowd of men in camo. Giles is driving like a maniac, and soon what’s left of the Initiative is only a dot in the rearview mirror.

Before she can let out a sigh of relief, Buffy feels hands settle on her hips and realizes that somehow she’s found her way into Spike’s lap. Cheeks rapidly turning pink, she scoots back over to her side and clips her seatbelt in. Glancing down to straighten her top where it’d ridden up thanks to Spike’s wandering hands, Buffy frowns.

There’s a rainbow on her tank top. No gross ‘Orgasm Donor’ innuendo anywhere.

She turns to glare at Spike. He gives her a cheeky grin, and for some odd reason, Buffy finds herself smiling back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BTW I've gone completely offroad from my original outline at this point (can you believe I planned for this fic to be 15k words at the most?). I still have the ending, but the middle has opened up a lot. Anyway, I want to know everyone's favorite road trip tropes so leave a comment with yours...for reasons.


	10. Chapter Ten

Her hands are red and raw, torn skin and blood around the knuckles, and Buffy’s ashamed of them for some reason she can’t quite remember. A girl with a blurry, shifting face is standing nearby, flickering in and out of existence. One minute, she’s a girl. But the next, she’s just a glowing orb of light floating off to the side by Buffy’s elbow.

“Clawed her way out of a coffin, that’s how. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Buffy automatically replies. She shuffles in discomfort. She realizes that she’s hovering on the lower steps of the staircase at her house—it _is_ her house, she knows it is, but it looks different. “That’s what I had to do.”

Spike nods. But his eyes are shimmering with tears. He’s dressed in strange, old-fashioned clothes—dirty trousers and a loose linen shirt and no shoes. Like her own hands, his are all mangled and bleeding. He is William, fresh from the grave.

“Done it myself,” he says.

“Death is our art. Our gift. We make it with our hands.” The words come out of her mouth—but no, this isn’t right, those aren’t her lines. Everything is getting all scrambled up.

The scene changes and she’s suddenly standing by the _Welcome to Sunnydale!_ sign. A big black car has just run over it for the first time. The thud of a pair of boots on the pavement fills the air, then a figure emerges, dressed all in black, hair appearing nearly white in the low light. Spike turns, leather duster flaring out around his legs. He stares at Buffy with yellow eyes.

“I’d rather be fighting you anyway.”

“Mutual,” Buffy responds.

But then his demon mask melts away and Spike’s grinning, reaching a hand out to her, and Buffy doesn’t even second-guess going over to take it. She stares down at their joined hands, fingers entwined together. She feels like she’s waiting for something, but it never comes. _Everything is getting all scrambled up_. In this dream, Spike doesn’t burn.

“Take better care of him this time,” Whistler says from somewhere behind them, but Buffy and Spike are only looking at each other.

* * *

 

She blinks, eyes heavy from sleep, and sits up in the backseat of the Jeep. The car, empty except for her, is parked in what seems to be a gas station parking lot. Spike is close, Buffy can sense him, and she supposes Giles must be chaperoning their vampire companion. Though what they’re doing is a total mystery to her. Giles might have had to use the bathroom, but why bring Spike? She doubts they’re off somewhere reminiscing about the old country. Are they stocking up on yummy road trip snacks? She hopes so, because Buffy could totally go for some sugar right about now.

But why didn’t they wake her? Could something bad have happened? Buffy doesn’t think herself capable of napping through an abduction, but you never know. With the close-call earlier still fresh in her mind, she’s pretty on edge.

Getting out of the car, Buffy stretches out her legs and rolls her shoulders. Her neck protests the movement. Ouch. Is it too much to hope for that there might be a chiropractor wherever Giles is taking her? Well, taking _them_ , since Spike is now apparently along for the ride. Her Watcher is probably not happy about his recent development. Or about the fact that she snuck off and almost got taken by Walsh and—yeah. A major lecture about responsibility in Buffy’s future? Seems likely.

Overhead, the sky is still dark, but she’s a bit stunned at how many stars she can see. They must be fairly far from any cities for it to look like that. Wow, how long were they driving? How long was she out? More importantly, are they almost there? Because Buffy still smells like sewer—she needs an emergency bathing session ASAP.

Still rubbing the tight muscle in her neck, Buffy wanders into the gas station. A bell jingles over the door, but the pimply teen at the register doesn’t even look up from his handheld video game device as she enters. Inside, the place is even smaller and more unkempt than she’d thought. The racks of potato chips and name-brand candy are poorly stocked, and the singular refrigerated case against the back wall, the one meant to keep soda and beer cold, isn’t even plugged in. By the bathrooms, prominently on display, there’s a whole stand full of dirty magazines. Ew.

Buffy wrinkles her nose, avoiding that section. With one glance, she can tell there’s no one among the racks of food, so she heads over to the counter and the bored employee. The boy looks up, eyeing her from under the pieces of reddish-brown hair falling across his forehead. Buffy gives him a bright smile, noting the name on his name-tag—Archie.

“Hiya, Archie. I’m looking for two guys. Both British. One has kind of a punk thing going on, and the other has more of a librarian vibe. Seen ‘em around?”

“The librarian’s in the men’s room over there. Don’t know about the other one. He bought a pack of Marlboros and then was wandering around, and I was trying to keep an eye on him ‘cause I’m supposed to watch folks who look…”

“Suspicious?”

“Uh-huh. But I lost sight of him. I saw him duck behind the damn chip rack and so I looked up to find him in the security mirror in the corner of the ceiling, but I couldn’t see him. He must’ve slipped outside and left somehow…” Archie trails off, shrugging.

“Or doesn’t have a reflection,” she grumbles to herself.

Idiot vampire.

“Thanks,” Buffy tells the kid at the counter, starting toward the bathrooms.

 “You need a key!” Archie calls out, tossing it to her.

But when she makes it to the girl’s door, the knob twists open without her even having to use the key. Smoke hits her nose and Buffy sighs, closing the bathroom door behind her.

“What do you think you’re doing in here?”

 “What does it look like, Slayer?” Spike teases. He’s sitting on the windowsill, one leg bent against the wooden frame while the other idly swings back and forth. His hand with the lit cig is resting on his knee so that most of the smoke goes out the open window.

Buffy crosses her arms and gives him her best glare.

He sighs. “Just havin’ a smoke, yeah? Rupert’s in the little boy’s room, so I had to come into this loo.”

“Why can’t you go outside and do that? You’re stinking up the whole bathroom.”

He puts on a show of looking absolutely scandalized. “Outside? In the dark, cold night…all by my lonesome? It’s dangerous out there, pet.”

“You just like making trouble. That kid out there’s stilling scratching his head and wondering about where you went.”

Spike smiles, slow and simmering. “What can I say, baby? I’m bad to the bone. Always have been.”

Buffy snorts. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

The humor on his face vanishes in an instant. “Fuck what you’ve heard.”

“Look, Spike—“

He slides down from the window, throwing his cigarette in the toilet. “No, love, you wanna talk? Let’s talk. Let’s fucking _talk_.”

Buffy swallows. She thinks she knows what’s coming, and she _knows_ she’s not ready for it, for any of it, but Spike suddenly seems determined. Determined to do what, though? She isn’t sure.

“You and I? We shagged.”

There it is. Huge, scary, and right out there in the open, a palpable thing floating between them in the air.

She digs her fingernails into the skin of her arms in an attempt to remain calm. “When you say ‘shagged’, you mean sexy stuff, right?”

Spike lets out a huff of frustration. “That’s what I mean, yeah.”

His hair is a mess of bleached curls, no gel at all to hold them back, and he doesn’t have his leather coat on either—where is his coat? She hasn’t seen him wearing it since…oh. Down in the lab, when they’d taken their clothes, they’d taken his duster. Another piece of his shell, gone.

Like this, angry and pleading and bare, Spike looks so human. There’s something desperate and expectant about the way he’s gazing at her now, and Buffy feels a little dizzy. And terrified.

“So? What do you want me to say to that, huh? What do you _want_ from me, Spike? You’re good in bed, congratulations! I knew you had to be good at something. Makes sense that it’s something that doesn’t use your brain.”

In the blink of an eye, he crowds her against the door. Buffy tenses for a blow that never comes. Instead, Spike just leans against her, hands planted on either side of her head, their torsos pressed together. She should feel caged in, trapped, but the position isn’t restrictive—it’s protective. It reminds her of how he’d sagged into her arms after taking a bullet for her in the Initiative lab.

Spike touches his forehead against hers. “Is that all it was? Just a good shag?”

“It was a spell, Spike.”

“What about after? Buffy, I’ve felt things and—down underground in that place, you let me hold you. I don’t get what’s happenin’ to me but I can’t…I feel cold when you’re not around.”

“You’re a vampire. You’re always cold,” Buffy says, but Spike’s laugh is brittle and humorless.

His next words are a whisper. “Dru was right. I thought it was madness but…she was right.”

“About what?”

His blue eyes meet hers. “About you. About us.”

Buffy shakes her head, slowly, sadly. “Spike, no. It isn’t real. This…it’s something left over from Willow’s Will Be Done spell; Tara explained it to me back in Sunnydale. I’ve felt it, too. But this thing between us…it’s all just the spell.”

Something about those words tastes weird, _wrong_ , in her mouth. An image flashes through Buffy’s head, Whistler speaking to her in the dream—but no, those dreams aren’t from the PTB, they’re a result of wonky magic. Tara had said, hadn’t she? All of a sudden, Buffy's not so certain anymore.

Spike’s hand ghosts along the strap of her tank top. Buffy shivers.

“Don’t buy that. I know magic, pet. This is more.”

She watches his throat bob as he swallows. Unable to speak, she buries her face in the junction of his shoulder, cheek against his pale throat.

“Doesn’t it feel like more, Buffy?” His breath is cool against the shell of her ear.

No. She has to tell him, make him understand. It’s cruel to lead him on, lead herself on. The feelings aren’t real for either of them and yet—

“Yes.” Her voice breaks. “It feels like more.”

Someone knocks at the door.

“Spike?” Giles calls, slightly muffled.

“We’ll be out in a minute,” the vampire responds.

A beat of silence. “ _We?_ ”

* * *

 

Giles lets her buy as many snacks as she wants on the strict condition that he can control the radio for the duration of the drive. It turns out to be a grave mistake.

“This song is, like, older than I am,” Buffy whines.

All her chocolate is gone, she can’t get back to sleep with the music blaring, and they still have about twenty minutes to go on this bumpy dirt road. Also, there’s nothing even remotely exciting to look at out the window either—just trees and trees and, oh look, more freaking trees. If they don’t stop (and soon), a major Buffy-sized tantrum is on the horizon.

On the literal horizon, a faint orangey glow in the sky signals the arrival of dawn. The sun will be rising shortly, and Spike’s a little antsy. He’s in the passenger seat up front because Buffy wanted the whole backseat to stretch out in, and Giles is not too pleased with the seating arrangements. But Buffy’s not sure why he’s so grumpy. After all, he and Spike keep ganging up on her about music, and are currently refusing to switch to a station that plays anything other than old rock songs.

“The youth of today knows nothin’ about true artistry,” Spike announces, turning the volume higher.

“Not so loud, you’re going to blow my bloody speakers.”

“Not _your_ speakers, mate.”

“Yeah,” Buffy joins in. “Why did we take my mom’s car?”

“She offered it. Since we’re going off-road, it was the best option.”

“Is there luggage or something in the trunk? Because I don’t care who is after me, Giles, I need to brush my teeth. And I need jammies.”

“If you had stayed at home instead of sneaking out through your bedroom window, perhaps you’d have been included during the packing.”

Spike can’t help himself from jumping in. “That’s right, Slayer,” he gleefully agrees. “You’ve been naughty, and we’re very disappointed in you. I think a good spanking should do the trick.”

Giles sighs. “Shut up, both of you.”

Buffy bristles, leaning between the two seats in the front to glare at the side of Giles’ face. “Me? I was asking an innocent question! Spike is the one getting icky.”

“Relax, love. Give the old man a break. If nobody packed you any Pjs, you can just sleep in your birthday suit. Like I plan on doing.”

She wacks the back of his head. Chuckling, Spike reaches his arm into the back seat to pull on her ponytail. It doesn’t hurt, just a playful tug. Trying not to grin, Buffy’s about to retaliate by tickling his armpit when the car stops.

“Okay, children. We’re here.”

The sky is much lighter. The sun’s not yet visible, but it will be probably any minute. Spike opens his door and hops out. Giles does the same and Buffy follows.

“Um, Giles. I think Spike was reading the map wrong. All I see is more trees.”

“Readin’ the map wrong? Do I look like a bleedin’ idiot?”

Buffy smirks, crossing her arms. “Well…”

“There’s a reason he didn’t give the map to you, Valley Girl. You’d’ve had us drivin’ in bloody circles all night.”

“That’s better than…wherever we are now. Which is, like, _nowhere_.”

“The cabin’s just a short walk down the path,” Giles interrupts their squabble, nodding to a break in the wall of greenery. “If we hurry, we should get there before the sun rises over the mountains.”

“No need to fuckin’ tell me twice,” Spike replies, squinting wearily at the brightening horizon.

Giles unlocks the Jeep’s trunk and Buffy helps him take the two duffle bags from within. She turns around to make Spike carry one of the bags, but he’s already long done, half-way down the path to the cabin. Asshole. Rolling her eyes, Buffy handles the bags as Giles shuts and locks the car.

In the distance, a gunshot echoes through the trees.


End file.
